An exploration of the descriptive validity of surveys designed to measure psychological and economic definitions of environmental value
Abstract
When responses to an environmental value survey are used to inform sustainability policy, the integrity of the policy framework requires the survey interpretation to have an acceptable level of validity. The thesis explores three interrelated research themes that examine challenges facing psychologists and economists who measure community environmental values with quantitative survey designs.
The first research theme examines the ambiguity and contested nature of the environmental value concept. In the sustainability domain, it is common practice for both psychologists and economists to administer an environmental value survey to a diverse population and then to only consider a single theoretical survey interpretation. Such an approach ignores the possibility that the survey questions will elicit response motives that are not formally accounted for by the researcher’s theoretical framework. A review of the conservation psychology, environmental & resource economics and ecological economic literature reveals that each of these fields of inquiry put forward a different conceptualisation of environmental value. By formally describing the ambiguous and contested nature of the environmental value concept, the thesis outlines some caveats of a research approach that focuses primarily on assessing the face validity of a single interpretation.
The second research question explores the challenges confronting researchers who empirically assess the validity of environmental value survey interpretations. When an environmental survey is administered in a quasi-experimental design, research conclusions are likely to be subject to various validity threats that reduce the ability of researchers to make an empirically informed conclusion about the validity of a particular survey interpretation. Furthermore, the very act of assessing validity involves making subjective decisions as to what evidence to consider and how to weigh up the overall body of evidence. When quasi-experimental survey responses are empirically assessed against only a single set of environmental value interpretation criteria, a combination of the subjectivity of the validity assessment process and reduced experimental control increases the vulnerability of researchers to the confirmation bias.
The third research question explores empirical approaches to examining the validity of environmental value survey interpretations and ways of minimising vulnerability to the confirmation bias. Three empirical studies are presented. One of the empirical studies examines the validity of the mainstream ‘value orientation’ interpretation of the Awareness of Consequence scale, which is widely administered by conservation psychologists. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses support an alternative interpretation that posits that the Awareness of Consequence scale measures beliefs about the consequences of environmental action/inaction rather than supporting the mainstream ‘value orientation’ interpretation. The final two empirical studies formally examine the validity of three interpretations of contingent valuation: the economic interpretation, the contribution model interpretation and the value pluralism interpretation. Both empirical studies support the value pluralism interpretation, which implies that economists in some circumstances would be better served by measuring community environmental values with a pluralism-as-a-methodology approach rather than insisting upon methodologies that measure community environmental values in monetary terms only.