Values, Environmental Concern, and Environmental Behavior: A Study into Household Energy Use

Wouter Poortinga, Linda Steg, Charles Vlek

Poortinga, Wouter, Linda Steg, and Charles Vlek. “Values, environmental concern, and environmental behavior: A study into household energy use.” Environment and behavior 36.1 (2004): 70-93.

This research example examines the influence of specific world values on environmental behavior and concern related to the field of household energy use. It was conducted in 2004 by 3 researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and University of East Anglia in the UK. Instead of proposing a defined research question (which could not be found in the article), the authors decided to state the aim of the study in the form of a declarative sentence. This stated that their investigation examines whether values, general environmental concern, and specific environmental beliefs are related to household energy use, the acceptability of specific energy-saving measures, and support for environmental policies. The type of data needed to answer the question includes reports of acts, behaviors or events, economic data, demographic data, self-identity data, deeply–held opinions and attitudes as well as personal feelings data. These data are all used to measure different scales of worldviews, quality of life, different beliefs regarding global warming, energy saving measures the respondents say that they participate in their daily life.

Data for this study were collected though a carefully designed questionnaire that was sent to 2,000 randomly selected addresses in the Netherlands, and in-depth interviews were conducted as a follow-up for some of the participants that wanted to go deeper with this study. Since the aim of the study is to determine specific correlations between certain variables, several regression analyses were conducted, with model variables being regressed with all preceding model variables as predictors. Analysis of the results revealed that home and transport energy use were especially related to socio-demographic variables like income and household size.

The overall structure of this research is very straightforward and understandable, however I did notice a few minor flaws in some of the specifics of the study. First, there was no defined research question, which I find quite odd. It was easy to interpret what question the authors were asking, but it should be given despite how easy the topic of study is. Second, the sample respondent’s answers used in the study didn’t accurately represent the entire population of the Netherlands. Lastly, the authors used the old New Environmental Paradigm scale, which contains questions that are considered to be outdated, so that may have caused some discrepancies in the results section of their paper. Something I think is interesting is that these authors found that using a purely attitudinal motivational model to explain environmental behavior may be too limited because environmental concern can be influenced by a great variety of factors. Therefor, concern for the environment may go deeper than we all initially think.