Exploring Value Differences: Impact on Attitudes Toward the Environment - Paper Sample

Introduction

This report investigates whether and how value differences impact people’s attitudes towards their environment. This report's findings highlighted the major drivers towards environmental sustainability and the realization of the changing environments as impacted by the surrounding societies. Habitat loss, climate changes, overconsumption of resources, and rise in natural hazards include environmental constraints resulting from people's culture and values that affect their attitude towards their environments. Attitude, a set of beliefs, behaviours, and emotions, impacts the environment in various ways due to the upbringing or experience that transforms people’s behaviours toward something (environment). Consequently, attitude toward the environment is a construct of different values, including benevolence, tradition, conformity, conservation, security, etc. This study aimed to evaluate whether and how differences in value affect people’s attitudes toward their environments.

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According to Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values, social sciences' inception embeds values as they explain personal and social organizations and changes. More importantly, values allow researchers to characterize societies, cultural groups, and individuals to trace changes and explain the base behaviours and attitudes. The theory has been widely applied and recognized by different people where distinct types of motivational values specify their relations. Value conflicts in different contexts (such as power and benevolence) while others are compatible and comparable (such as security and conformity); hence the structure and nature of values depict the conflict and congruence relationship among values. Consequently, despite the relationship in nature and structure of values, their relative impact and importance differ between individuals and groups (Sagiv & Schwartz, 2000). The value-expressive function of attitude denotes that personal values towards a societal issue are centrally held and embedded in various factors, including conservation, security, tradition, and conformity. Conformity and traditional values are especially motivational as they subordinate the individual to socially imposed expectations. Whereas traditions exhort ideas, religion, and cultural customs, conformity entails responsiveness to changing and current expectations. Consequently, security, which derives from basic requirements, defines stability, relationships, safety, and self in the society whose degree of significance impacts people’s attitude towards the environment (Schwartz, 2012). Therefore, personal attitude towards the environment is highly dependent on competent performance as the blueprint for resource generation, survival, and reaching objectives.

The pursuit of these values and attitudes has social, practical, and psychological implications for society and individuals due to their dynamic and explicate relations. Besides, there are congruency and conflicts among these values (Rohan, 2000). Human effects on the environment, including water, plants, animals, and air, have never been more massive than witnessed now. Since 1970, approximately 60% of fish, mammal, reptiles, and bird species have decreased sizably. Pollution has become part and parcel of today’s society due to varied norms and values. The research aimed at establishing the relationship between values and attitudes towards their environments by answering the research questions: What is the relationship between values/attitudes and societal, and environmental issues? How do different values influence people’s attitudes towards environments? The research hypotheses were:

Participants

The research adopted convenience sampling to select 65 participants to inform the study. The participants were first-year La Trobe University students aged over 17 years. Through the adoption of informed consent and voluntary participation, the researcher recruited participants by asking them to complete a short anonymous survey on attitudes and values toward societal issues. Volunteer participants were then given a copy of the Participation Information Statement and questionnaire to fill with respect to the study topic.

Materials

The study adopted questionnaires as the material to collect data from the participants. To collect relevant data for the study topic, the Twenty Item Values Inventory was employed to measure the participants' attitudes. A Likert scale was used to measure participants’ attitudes towards the environments. The five-scale Likert scale used had values from 1 (Strongly Disagree SD) and 5 (Strongly Agree SA). Ten different questions were used to capture a range of attitudes, thus enhancing the result's credibility. Besides, the independent variables, Conservation (higher-order values) and conformity, tradition, and security (basic values) employed a Likert scale ranging from -2 (Not like me at all) and 2 (Very much like me) as highlighted in appendices 1 and 2.

Procedure

The research started with preparing the questionnaires, which were tested and pretested for accuracy and completeness. This was followed by sampling (convenience), selection, and recruitment of participants. The recruitment process entailed informing the participants of the study's objectives and significance besides assuring them of their information protection. Participants were required to fill out the Participant Information Statement to ascertain their commitment, consent, and voluntary participation in the study. This was followed by participants completing the short anonymous questionnaire, which requested information not limited to attitude, conservation, security, conformity, and tradition. They were required to fill out the questionnaire in completeness and truthfully to meet the research's quality standards. Participants had ample time to complete the questionnaires, during which the researcher contacted them on their progress.

Results

The quantitative study employed correlation analysis to establish the relationship between the dependent variable (attitude) and the independent variables (conservation, tradition, security, and conformity). The correlation matrix below summarizes the relationships between the study variables.

Sig 0.76 0.00 0.63 0.21 There exists a weak negative relationship between the dependent variable (attitude score) and independent variables (conservation, conformity, tradition, and security). The correlation coefficients of conservation (-0.18), conformity (-0.11), tradition (-0.07), and security (-0.04) indicate that there is a weak relationship between the dependent and independent variables. Besides, the p-value of conservation (p=0.15), conformity (p=0.40), tradition (p=0.60), and security (p=0.76) are greater than 0.05 depicting that the correlations are not significant (p>0.05). However, there exists a significant correlation between the independent variables. Therefore, the study fails to reject the null hypothesis as there is no statistically significant correlation between the dependent and independent variables.

Discussion

The study aimed to ascertain the hypotheses of the non-existence of relationships between people’s attitude and their responses to the environments and the impact of different values on people’s attitudes towards their environments. The data supported the study's null hypothesis (Different values have no significant impact on people’s attitudes toward their environments and No positive relationship exists between people’s attitude and their responses to the environments). From the correlation analysis, the p-values of all independent variables with respect to dependent variables were >0.05, highlighting the non-existence of significant relationships. The weak negative correlation coefficient indicated that the relationship between the variables was weak and negative, hence no statistically significant association.

Environmental changes resulting from carbon emissions are in the realm of government, organizational, and societal operations. Barr (2007) highlighted that the environment's changes and approaches embed environmental values, psychological factors, and situational variables. This advances the concept of value expressive functions of attitude, which expresses individual concepts on the environments. Inkpen & Baily (2020) summarize that people’s actions and concerns are strongly influenced by a spectrum of beliefs, attitudes, and cultural values. Consequently, the framework of individual and societal values affects the acceptability, the nature, and the magnitude of environmental issues. Adger et al. (2013) further asserted that individuals' actions and generations of environmental issues are deeply embedded in cultural frameworks. These indicate that despite attitude playing a critical role in enhancing people's perception toward the environments, other factors play more role in establishing the relationship.

The study relied on primary, quantitative data to establish the impact of value differences on people’s attitudes toward their environments. Despite the findings of the research, it was culminated by limited data sources. First, the primary data collected was a constraint to first-year students in the institution, and only 65 samples were collected. Besides, the attitude scale employed in the study was very subjective, which would have impacted the results in one way or another besides using only one statistical test. More research should be done using both qualitative and quantitative data to establish the association between the variables. Besides, a large and diverse population sample should be used to enhance the reliability and validity of data.