Assessing the structure and correlations of connectedness to nature, environmental concerns and environmental behavior in a Greek context

Abstract

The current study examines connectedness to nature feelings, environmental concerns and environmental behavior in a Greek population. The structure of these constructs and their relations were assessed with the help of Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Data were collected from two random Greek citizen samples using questionnaire survey method. We used the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) to measure connectivity to nature feelings and Environmental Motives Scale (EMS) to assess peoples’ environmental concern in both studies. Items from previous research were adopted to measure peoples’ environmental behavior. In study 1, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) suggested that connectedness to nature is a uni-dimensional measure, while environmental behavior and environmental concerns are multidimensional constructs. In study 2, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirmed the proposed structure of all constructs in the study. The SEM model tested the associations among connectedness to nature, environmental concern, and the behavioral domains and showed an acceptable fit. The results indicated that, after controlling for age, gender and education, connectedness to nature, egoistic and biospheric concerns were significantly related to personal practices, while altruistic concerns had a significant but negative correlation with personal practices. Only egoistic concerns showed a significant and positive relationship with environmental action. The reported findings have implications on policy related to the promotion of pro-environmental behavior and contribute to social science research that aims to understand human responses to a changing environment. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.