Abstract
The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale is the most commonly used environmental attitude measure around the world but is still plagued by its confusing dimensional structures. The same has existed in China for more than 10 years, and there are still significant problems with the improvement solutions available. From a psychometric perspective, the wording effect arising from mixed wording directions is considered the leading cause. Based on a Chinese national-level data set, our study examined this effect in the NEP scale using an emerging bi-factor modeling approach. The results indicate that all items can be loaded on a general NEP factor while negatively worded items need to be additionally loaded on a method factor. The absence of this method factor can lead to biased results. Overall, the optimal way to use the NEP scale is to retain all items and control the wording effect through a bi-factor model before further analysis.
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Availability of data and materials
The dataset analysed during the current study are available in the Chinese National Survey Data Archive (CNSDA), http://www.cnsda.org/.
Notes
Note that widespread use does not mean that the NEP scale is widely accepted as covering the entire content domain of environmental attitudes. Indeed, it may cover a small fraction of them (e.g., see Milfont & Duckitt, 2010). Nevertheless, how the NEP scale theoretically matches environmental attitudes is not the focus of this study; instead, we empirically focus on the dimensional debate left over from its long history of application.
The underlying assumption of using both positively worded and negatively worded items is that they essentially measure the same construct (Chyung et al., 2018). In addition to problems due to the method factor, it is also possible that the different wording directions lead to conceptual differences in the measured mental constructs, e.g., positive wording may trigger a unique mental construct. However, from a conceptual perspective, the positively worded items in the NEP scale correspond in a practical sense to the negatively worded ones, with the latter representing the environmentally unfriendly dominant social paradigm (DSP) and the former representing the pro-environmental new ecological paradigm (NEP) as a response to the DSP (Dunlap, 2008). Thus, positively worded items and negatively worded items are each less likely to trigger new, unique constructs that leave a poor correspondence between the two types of items.
Correlations between factors in bi-factor modeling can cause problems in model convergence, model identification, or theoretical interpretation (see Markon, 2019). In addition, the better-known higher-order factor model is a version of the bi-factor model with more constraints (Mansolf & Reise, 2017). However, as Bornovalova et al. (2020) argued, a bi-factor model generally provides a cleaner and more interpretable assessment of theoretical hypotheses than a higher-order factor model.
Note that their exclusion did not affect the presentation and interpretation of results since an extended model would not be compared to a nonextended model.
The construct replicability H of the negatively worded method factor was calculated to be 0.72 based on M1-N, indicating that this factor is well-defined and can be used for further analysis.
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This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72271030).
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Changjiang Tang, Borui Yang, Hao Tian; Methodology and formal analysis: Changjiang Tang; Writing - original draft preparation: Changjiang Tang, Borui Yang; Writing - review and editing: Changjiang Tang, Borui Yang, Hao Tian; Supervision: Hao Tian.
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Tang, C., Yang, B. & Tian, H. Examination of the wording effect in the new ecological paradigm scale in China: a bi-factor modeling approach. Curr Psychol 43, 5887–5900 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04801-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04801-z