Urban Jan, Kaiser Florian G
Environment Centre, Charles University, Prague, Czechia.
Global Change Research Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czechia.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jul 5;13:875419. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.875419. eCollection 2022.
People differ in their personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment. The question is, can we validly measure people's commitment by what they say and what they claim they do in opinion polls? In our research, we demonstrate that opinions and reports of past behavior can be aggregated into comparable depictions of people's personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment (i.e., their environmental attitudes). In contrast to the commonly used operational scaling approaches, we ground our measure of people's environmental attitudes in a mathematically formalized psychological theory of the response process-the Campbell paradigm. This theory of the response process has already been extensively validated, and its relevance for manifest behavior has repeatedly been shown as well. In our secondary analysis of Eurobarometer data ( = 27,998) from 28 European countries, we apply the Campbell paradigm to a set of indicators that was not originally collected to be aggregated into a single scale. With our research, we propose a distinct way to measure behavior-relevant environmental attitudes that can be used even with a set of indicators that was originally atheoretically compiled. Overall, our study suggests that the Campbell paradigm provides a sound psychological measurement theory that can be applied to cross-cultural comparisons in the environmental protection domain.
人们在应对气候变化和保护环境的个人承诺方面存在差异。问题在于，我们能否通过民意调查中人们的言论以及他们声称自己所做的事情来有效衡量他们的承诺？在我们的研究中，我们证明，观点和过去行为的报告可以汇总成人们应对气候变化和保护环境的个人承诺（即他们的环境态度）的可比描述。与常用的操作量表方法不同，我们衡量人们环境态度的方法基于一种数学形式化的反应过程心理理论——坎贝尔范式。这种反应过程理论已经得到广泛验证，其与明显行为的相关性也多次得到证明。在我们对来自28个欧洲国家的欧洲晴雨表数据（=27998）的二次分析中，我们将坎贝尔范式应用于一组最初并非为汇总成单一量表而收集的指标。通过我们的研究，我们提出了一种独特的方法来衡量与行为相关的环境态度，即使是对于一组最初未经理论编制的指标也可使用。总体而言，我们的研究表明，坎贝尔范式提供了一种可靠的心理测量理论，可应用于环境保护领域的跨文化比较。
