Development and Validation of the Environmental Communication Scale

Common Topics and Commonplaces of Environmental Rhetoric

“…As motivations for proenvironmental behavior differ (e.g., Cameron, Brown, & Chapman, 1998; Kassing, Johnson, Kloeber, & Wentzel, 2010), a rhetor could simplify the argument that proenvironmental action is easy by invoking “recycling,” and since religion is a strong motivator for environment-related action (e.g., Greeley, 1993; Stoll, 1997; Wardekker, Petersen, & van der Sluijs, 2009; White, 1967), generating an environmental argument with the “religion” topic has the potential to be quite powerful. Last, the “seeing is believing” topic asks for audiences to trust what they can see for themselves, and while this is potentially problematic (e.g., Allen, 1996), guiding an audience toward desired associations by asking members to remember a visit to the Grand Canyon, for example, or even how frustrated they get when they have to clean trash out of their front yards, could prove useful.…”

“… 5. See, for example, Cordano, Welcomer, and Scherer’s (2003) examination of the New Ecological Paradigm Scale; Kassing, Johnson, Kloeber, and Wentzel’s (2010) development of an Environmental Communication Scale; Kempton, Boster, and Hartley’s (1995) examination of environmental values in American culture; Killingsworth and Palmer’s (1992) consideration of environmental rhetoric; and Pelletier, Tuson, Green-Demers, Noels, and Beaton’s (1998) examination of environmental motivation, among others. …”

“… 12. Publications by authors such as Cantrill (2010) and Kassing et al (2010) support this choice. They suggest that quantification of environment-related perceptions is almost always problematic because researchers must ultimately impose a definition on complex concepts (e.g., “environment”) that limit the value of the study. …”

Environmental Worldviews: A Point of Common Contact, or Barrier?

“…Given the preponderance of studies that use the NEP as a measure of endorsement of pro-ecological worldviews (recent examples [19,20,[22][23][24][25][26]28,[35][36][37]), and the current interest in the literature regarding the NEP's ability to differentiate within populations, the opportunity to investigate any difference in NEP scores across a population of sustainability scientists presents an interesting challenge. The first subset in question-faculty in the SSI-are researchers actively engaged in knowledge co-production and collaboration with stakeholders, a strategy designed to improve the usefulness of science and align the supply of and demand for science.…”

“…A worldview is an individual's belief about one's own role in the world. The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), a measure of general pro-environmental and ecological worldview, has been used as the primary metric in many studies to capture an individual's existing environmental proclivities [19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. The NEP has been used in measuring the: values of whole populations [26], the impacts of education on attitudinal change [27], as a mediator in predicting environmental behavior [28], attitudes towards persuasion agents [25] and, in its earlier version the New Environmental Paradigm, other aspects of environmental worldviews [29,30].…”