Using latent class analysis to produce a typology of environmental concern in the UK

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

Factor analysis is often used to study environmental concern. This choice of methodology is driven by predominant theories that tie environmental attitudes to the multidimensional construct of environmental concern. This paper demonstrates that using a clustering method such as latent class analysis can be a valuable tool for studying environmental attitudes as they exist within a given population. In making the case for the value of latent class analysis in this context, we examine UK public concern for the environment and how this concern is associated with pro-environmental behaviours. To do this we use responses to DEFRA's 2009 Survey of Public Attitudes and Behaviours towards the Environment, which is still the most nationally representative survey of its type in the UK. Grouping respondents according to homogenous response patterns, we identify four classes of people, defined by their concern for the environment: Pro-environment, Neutral Majority, Disengaged and Paradoxical. To understand how these attitude classes are associated with behaviour and socio-economic status, class membership probability is regressed onto education, income and social grade, as well as 16 measures of environmental behaviour related to transport, food, recycling and home energy conservation. The results contradict most previous research with the environmental attitude classes by being highly predictive of environmental behaviour.

Original languageEnglish
JournalSocial Science Research
Volume74
Pages (from-to)210-222
Number of pages13
ISSN0049-089X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 08.2018

Recently viewed

Prizes

  1. Transferpreis

Publications

  1. An Experimental Approach to the Optimization of Customer Information at the Point of Sale
  2. Home range size and resource use of breeding and non-breeding white storks along a land use gradient
  3. Class size, student performance and Tiebout bias
  4. Feature Extraction and Aggregation for Predicting the Euro 2016
  5. Ablation Study of a Multimodal Gat Network on Perfect Synthetic and Real-world Data to Investigate the Influence of Language Models in Invoice Recognition
  6. Perfectly nested or significantly nested - an important difference for conservation management
  7. The role of plant biodiversity in modifying the structure and functioning of higher tropic Levels in species-rich forests
  8. Computational modelling of submicron-sized metallic glasses
  9. Determinants and Outcomes of Dual Distribution:
  10. Facing Up to Third Party Liability for Space Activities
  11. Erroneous examples as desirable difficulty
  12. Implementation of Chemometric Tools to Improve Data Mining and Prioritization in LC-HRMS for Nontarget Screening of Organic Micropollutants in Complex Water Matrixes
  13. Deactivation and transformation products in biodegradability testing of ß-lactams amoxicillin and piperacillin
  14. Explaining Disagreement on Interest Rates in a Taylor-Rule Setting
  15. The implications of knowledge hiding at work for recovery after work: A diary study
  16. Fusion of knowledge bases for better navigation of wheeled mobile robotic group with 3D TVS
  17. 2. Advent
  18. Consular Assistance: Rights, Remedies, and Responsibility Comments on the ICJ's Judgment in the LaGrand Case
  19. An Approach for Ex-Post-Facto Analysis of Knowledge Graph-Driven Chatbots – The DBpedia Chatbot
  20. Some results on output algebraic feedback with applications to mechanical systems
  21. EMA Links with Management Systems and Other Stakeholders
  22. The polarity field concept