Dear Christine,

I am interested in knowing more details on your question.

May I ask you to specify:

Do these values refer to the environment as per defined by environmental science (e.g., kg CO2 emitted) or do they refer to a broader "natural and social environment" in which individuals leave?

Thank you.

Dear llaria,

Many thanks for your reply.

This is a tentative query for a project to identify potential environmental champions within a particular organisation. The organisation is interested in identifying employees with 'green' concerns, in general, e.g., climate change; reducing landfill, love of nature, etc. 

My own research uses personal values theory and environmental values are encompassed under universalism on the Schwartz PVQ, but we want to profile employees' pro-environmental behaviour (rather than the more general prosocial behaviour)  in terms of their own personal concerns  - or not - about the environment? Andrew Crane in his qualitative study of the greening of organisations ('Marketing, Morality and the Natural Environment', Routledge and Stephen Fineman 'The business of greening', also Routledge) referred to employees described by the researchers in terms of 'shades of green.' Employees could be asked to self-select for the project, of course. 

Best wishes,

Christine

Dear Christine,

thank you for providing me with more details.

I think that I could provide a more complete answer once I read the studies you posted more carefully.

For now, let me say that using a "shades-of-green" scale to present the different levels of being a "environmental champion" within the company is a powerful way to get a visual understanding of the final outcome of the questionnaire/survey for each individual (both for the researchers conducting the study and the employees who are going to see their own result. Note: it is a good way to create a beneficial "competition" among the employees on going green).

The interesting point to me is on how to associate the scale by which the questionnaire is performed and the "shades of green". For instance, if you use only PEB + Likert scale, you weight each environmentally-conscious behavior by only the frequency by which it gets undertaken by the individual. This works out if you consider that each behavior has the same importance or impact on the environment (for instance, recycling a newspaper is as much "green" as voting for a candidate who supported environmental issues"). If this is not the way in which you want to design the study, the different behaviors you are including in the questionnaire must be weighted. Of course this will add more analyses to be done (e.g., LCA analyses), assumptions and complexity. 

I hope that this reply might have brought some thoughts to you.

Good luck with this interesting study.

Best wishes

Ilaria

This is really useful, llaria, thank you very much indeed.

Best,

Christine