Development of a Scale to Analyse the Environmental Sustainability through Urban Gardens

摘要

Research was conducted to understand how gardeners perceive environmental sustainability for which there is a need to measure using a psycho metric scale. Though several scales available were intended to measure the other forms of sustainability i.e.economic, agriculture, social etc. whereas environmental sustainability per se was not available. So, the study was taken to develop a scale to measure environmental sustainability through urban nutri-gardens in Bangalore district. Likert summated scaling technique was employed. Based on operational definition of construct - environmental sustainability through urban nutri-gardens responses for 70 items belongs to 6 domains were obtained from 56 judges. Based on relevancy‘test, 59 items were retained.Responses for these 59 items were obtained from 32 urban gardeners of non-sample area. Criterion group performed to evaluate individual items and critical ratio was calculated using t-test. Forty eight statements with highest‘t’ values equal to or greater than 2.45 were selected and subjected to reliability in non-sample area consisting of 32 urban gardeners. Correlation coefficient was 0.9210 and ‘r’ value after adjusting for scale was 0.9592 which was significant at 1:00 per cent level indicatingthe high reliability of the instrument. Validity, which was found to be 0.974 for scale. Hence, the validity coefficient was also found to be appropriate and suitable for the tool developed. All the components considered were appropriate in measuring theenvironmental sustainability of the urban gardener’s through urban gardens. Final scale composed of 48 statements. The developed scale was administered to 32 gardeners in the non-sample study area as a pilot study and it was found that 40.63 per cent of the gardeners had medium level of environmental sustainability. This specifically developed scale can be used to measure the gardener’s environmental sustainability in study area as well as beyond the study area.