Measuring Environmental Worldviews: Investigating the Dimensionality of the New Environmental Paradigm Scale for Children in a Large Central European Sample

Abstract

A complex research program linked to the national Sustainability Thematic Week (STW) educational program was launched in 2020 to examine Hungarian primary and secondary school students’ environmental attitudes, behaviors, and awareness. The Hungarian newly developed version of the New Ecological Paradigm Scale for Children was used in a large sample (N = 9396). The results of a set of factor analyses suggested that the NEP Scale for Children cannot be considered unidimensional. We found three distinct and valid factors (Questioning of Human Intervention, Rights of Nature, and Eco-Crisis) with significant associations, having partially different directions, with gender, age, pro-environmental behavior, and economic-technical aspects of environmental worldviews, providing thus new evidence for the highly complex structural characteristics of pro-environmental attitudes and worldviews. Our results might contribute to solving the issues, misunderstandings, and challenges that are related to the dimensionality of the NEP Scale and, even after decades of use, make the comparison of international research difficult.