Development of an environmental values typology.

摘要

Environmental concerns are increasing on both individual and societal levels. With a sound scheme for describing and classifying the way people value the environment, planners and other social scientists could better understand the relationships between humans and the environment, and promote improved solutions to environmental problems. Few such typologies or classification schemes exist, and instruments to measure and track these values are also lacking.; Existing typologies of environmental values are mostly normative, and are not empirically derived or grounded in data. These typologies are generally based on three broad categories (egocentrism, anthropocentrism, and ecocentrism) and provide little direction for further definition or for future application for measurement purposes. Existing psychological value scales are also unable to measure environmental values and attitudes very well.; This dissertation seeks to help remedy this gap by developing a typology of environmental values that is informed by and developed from existing typologies, but is also grounded in data. Existing environmental value typologies, as well as a number of existing psychological value scales, are synthesized, extended, and validated using three diverse data sets of public comment on environmental issues that are part of previous published research. In the earlier research, environmental values within the data were identified using computerized and manual text analysis procedures. In this dissertation, I used manual sorting techniques and a series of checklist-type matrices to analyze and compare the data sets with existing environmental value typologies and psychological value scales.; The result of my analysis is an environmental values typology consisting of 68 different environment-related values organized within seven different value realms. The value realms encompass the inner self, the outer self; society/humanity, human-nature interactions, the ecosphere, physical elements , and time. Because this typology is grounded in more extensive data sources, it should have greater utility in a variety of resource management and environmental planning applications, including the development of a scale to measure environmental values.