other sciences, has recently been grasping (some would say "gasping") for relevance. For many sciences, a mere glance from the windows of their ivory towers brought an end to the search for relevancy. Their eyes burned and their vision was limited by the hazylike condition of the atmosphere; they were overwhelmed with the numbers of people, the noises they made, the material they consumed, their trappings and their trash. The landscape was changing rapidly, and the view from the tower was no longer pleasant and the tower itself no longer isolated. The issue of ecology demanded relevance. Indeed, it demanded preeminence. With the problem apparent, scientists began to look for a solution in their typical fashion. Technological solutions were sought for what were defined as technological problems. Thus, the rush is now on to develop new gasolines, new engines, nonpolluting detergents and energy sources, biodegradable products of all kinds, filtering systems and recycling systems, etc. Society appears to have made the assumption that such advances will, indeed, solve the problem.Technology has won battles in the past, in the arenas of medicine, transportation, and automation, but it may not provide the answer to the current ecological crisis. First, the mushrooming nature of 1 This article is based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association, Portland, Oregon, April 1972.
Maloney and Ward (1973) attempted to reconceptualize the ecological crisis, not as a technological problem but as a crisis of maladaptive behavior: "Conceptualized in this manner, the solution to such a problem does not lie in traditional technological approaches but rather in the alteration of human behavior" (p. 583). Such alteration, however, is not feasible, perhaps not even possible, until critical population behaviors are assessed adequately. Consequently, the authors further stressed that we must "go to the people" to understand these behaviors. We must determine what the population knows, thinks, feels, and actually does regarding ecology and pollution. "These are necessary antecedent steps that must be made before an attempt can be made to modify critically relevant behaviors" (p. 584).In a preliminary attempt to provide such data, Maloney and Ward (1973) developed a 128-item1 ecological attitude-knowledge scale that was received with considerable interest and requests to use the scale in a variety of research projects. The present study sought to refine and shorten the original scale in an attempt to provide a more practical and efficient instrument and, second, to make the revised scale publicly available.
MethodThe original scale was comprised of four subscalcs: verbal commitment (VC), which measures wbal a person states he is willing to do in reference to pollution-environment issues (31 items); actual commitment (AC), which measures what a person actually does in reference to pollutionenvironment issues (36 items); affect (A), which measures the degree of emotionality related to such issues {37 items);
Evaluated the reliability and validity of objective scoring procedures on the Draw‐A‐Person Test. Handler's (1967) scales and other ratings of overall quality were used. Ss were mentally retarded persons, hospitalized and nonhospitalized psychotics, and normals. Naive raters scored the protocols under blind conditions. Reliability estimates for both sets of scales ranged from 0.42 to 0.78 Positive evidence also is presented, which indicates that overall quality does relate to overall level of psychological adjustment. Group and scale differences are discussed.
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