Using a Gaussian Graphical Model to Explore Relationships Between Items and Variables in Environmental Psychology Research

Abstract

Exploratory analyses are an important first step in psychological research, particularly in problem-based research where various variables are often included from multiple theoretical perspectives not studied together in combination before. Notably, exploratory analyses aim to give first insights into how items and variables included in a study relate to each other. Typically, exploratory analyses involve computing bivariate correlations between items and variables and presenting them in a table. While this is suitable for relatively small data sets, such tables can easily become overwhelming when datasets contain a broad set of variables from multiple theories. We propose the Gaussian graphical model as a novel exploratory analyses tool and present a systematic roadmap to apply this model to explore relationships between items and variables in environmental psychology research. We demonstrate the use and value of the Gaussian graphical model to study relationships between a broad set of items and variables that are expected to explain the effectiveness of community energy initiatives in promoting sustainable energy behaviors.

Avoidance, Rationalization, and Denial: Defensive Self-Protection in the Face of Climate Change Negatively Predicts Pro-Environmental Behavior

“…variables, controlling for all other variables in the dataset (Bhushan et al, 2019). This analysis revealed only weak clustering of self-protective strategies, contradicting H2.…”

The Relationship Between People’s Environmental Considerations and Pro-environmental Behavior in Lithuania

“…Yet, the goal of the current research was to test the relationship between people’s environmental considerations and pro-environmental behaviors. While the absolute values of these variables could potentially differ across different demographic groups, we do not have a reason to expect that this would change the relationship between these variables (see also Schultz et al, 2005; De Groot and Steg, 2007; De Groot et al, 2012; Bhushan et al, 2019). We indeed found no effects of gender on the relationship between people’s environmental considerations and pro-environmental behaviors, and the relationship remained the same irrespective of the method of the data collection.…”

Exploring relationships between climate change beliefs and energy preferences: A network analysis of the European Social Survey

“…Psychological network models were first introduced in the field of psychopathology (e.g., Borsboom & Cramer, 2013;Fried et al, 2018). Network models have been successfully employed to explore relationships between various concepts (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, anxiety and depression symptoms) in various subfields of psychology, including social psychology (Brandt, Sibley, & Osborne, 2019;Dalege, Borsboom, van Harreveld, & van der Maas, 2019;Dalege et al, 2016), clinical psychology (Fried et al, 2018), and environmental psychology (Bhushan et al, 2019). These papers, like ours, aimed to investigate relationships between variables of interest, to further develop theorizing in their fields.…”

“…Network models provide a solution as network models do focus on individual variables and network models allow for easier inference than correlation matrices, which tend to get large and overwhelming when the number of included variables is large. We believe that one of the main benefits of our application of network models is that, while previous research has focused on relationships between various psychological constructs and behaviors, there have been few attempts at an overarching view of many concepts and their relationships (e.g., Bhushan et al, 2019).…”