Measuring pro-environmental behavior: Review and recommendations

By F. Lange, S. Dewitte. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2019

691 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Any scientific attempt to understand, predict, or promote pro-environmental behavior requires an adequate measurement tool for the assessment of pro-environmental behavior. The multidisciplinary interest in pro-environmental behavior has generated a large variety of such tools, ranging from domain-general and domain-specific self-report measures, field observations conducted with the help of informants, trained observers, or technical devices, to behavioral tasks for use in the laboratory. The present review discusses this broad spectrum of existing approaches to the measurement of pro-environmental behavior, their strengths and weaknesses, as well as possibilities to improve upon them. From this review, we deduce several recommendations for the development, selection, and application of measures in pro-environmental behavior research. We conclude by stressing the importance of established and validated measures for a cumulative science of pro-environmental behavior.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5daed735ea5bbf369a85848d3221567e7505e5e

How researchers see this paper

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In Applied Psychology

1. R. Lumber
2. Miles Richardson
3. W. Sheate
4. Ute B. Thiermann
5. Xiongzhi Wang
6. Chaozhi Zhang
7. A. Hunt
8. Rory Thomas

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. A. Hunt
2. Miles Richardson
3. R. Lumber
4. R. Dowling
5. W. Sheate
6. Ute B. Thiermann
7. Edmund Goh
8. Xiongzhi Wang

In Marketing

1. R. Dowling
2. Miles Richardson
3. W. Sheate
4. Ute B. Thiermann
5. Edmund Goh
6. Xiongzhi Wang
7. Chaozhi Zhang
8. A. Hunt

Citations in the corpus

• The green care code: How nature connectedness and simple activities help explain pro‐nature conservation behaviours (2020, background): “In general, pro-environmental behaviours are focused on reducing one's carbon footprint and/or minimizing the impact of one's actions on the environment (see reviews by Lange & Dewitte, 2019; Li, Zhao, Ma, Shao, & Zhang, 2019).”
• The Way Forward in Mindfulness and Sustainability: a Critical Review and Research Agenda (2020, background): “Lange and Dewitte (2019) identified 42 such measures in 49 studies, but judged that only the General Ecological Behaviour measure (Kaiser and Wilson 2004) showed a sufficient level of psychometric validity.”
• Personal norms and the adoption of pro-environmental binning behaviour in national parks: an integrated structural model approach (2020, background): “Lange and Dewitte (2019) conducted a literature review of 33 established multi-item scales for the assessment of pro-environmental behaviour, 20 of the identified scales were designed to measure PEB in general and the remaining 13 measured specific domains of PEB.”
• Contingent effects of social norms on tourists’ pro-environmental behaviours: the role of Chinese traditionality (2020, methodology): “Future studies should then use different approaches to measure PEBs (Lange & Dewitte, 2019) and attempt to examine actual behaviours.”