Assessing Cognitive and Social Attitudes toward Environmental Conservation in Coral Reef Social-Ecological Systems

• Main Author: Kostas Alexandridis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-06-01
• Series: Social Sciences
• Subjects: environmental attitudes; coral reefs; scale development; item-response theory; graded response model; social-ecological systems; reliability; generalized structural equation model
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/7/7/109

This study addresses the latent construct of attitudes toward environmental conservation based on study participant’s responses. We measured and evaluated the latent scale based on an 18-item scale instrument, over four experimental strata (N = 945) in the US Virgin Islands and the Caribbean. We estimated the latent scale reliability and validity. We further fitted multiple alternative two-parameter logistic (2PL) and graded response models (GRM) from Item-Response Theory. We finally constructed and fitted equivalent structural and generalized structural equation models (SEM/GSEM) for the attitudinal latent scale. All scale measures (composite, alpha-based, IRT-based, and SEM-based) were consistently and reliably valid measures of the study participants’ latent attitudes toward conservation. We found statistically significant differences among participant’s attributes relating to socio-demographic, physical, and core environmental characteristics of participants. We assert that the nature of relationship between cognitive attitudes and individual as well as social behavior related to environmental conservation.