ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS



Human Attitudes About The Macro-Proximal Environment



By PAUL ARTHUR SCIPIONE, Ph.D.



Thesis Director: Professor Baruch Boxer



Many existing studies of human environmental attitudes either focus narrowly on attitudes toward rare and esoteric environments; or consider the natural (physical), artificial (manmade) and social environments separately. The present study makes a systematic appraisal of human attitudes toward typical, "everyday" environments (termed the macro-proximal) and considers attitudes toward all three types of environments, inasmuch as these are not commonly separated during normal man-environment interaction.

This research has been directed toward measuring and explaining variability in human environmental attitudes. Six hypotheses were posed.  First, it was hypothesi2ed that variations in environmental "satisfaction" and importance" attitudes are not merely random variations, but rather are variations which are non-independent of three types of human characteristics: (1) personal (age, sex, race/ethnic group, parental and marital status); (2) socio-economic (education and income); and (3) experiential (past and present experiences and satisfactions with urban, suburban and rural environments). In addition to these three central hypotheses, three other related hypotheses were posed: (4) that personal and socio-economic characteristics are also reflected in (correlated with) experiential characteristics; (5) that a significant relationship also exists between the environmental aspects humans rate as either very important or unimportant and those aspects they are either highly satisfied or dissatisfied with; and (6) that human cognitive structuring of environmental aspects is invariant of individual and group characteristics -- that humans basically structure their external environments similarly.

In order to test the six hypotheses, a large-scale survey of the environmental attitudes of 235 respondents was conducted. Respondents completed an environmental questionnaire which consisted of 53 environmental aspects, each of which was rated on a 7-point satisfaction and 5-point importance scales. Respondents also provided anonymous background information on 17 personal, socio-economic and experiential variables. A number of pretest interviews and two smaller-scale empirical studies preceeded the full-scale survey. The 235 voluntary respondents cams from two groups -- 160 employees of a large New Jersey industrial firm and 75 faculty members and students from Rutgers University.  The respondents were not chosen through a completely random probability sample, but were somewhat representative of the broad cross-section of people who live in central New Jersey.

Several research methods were used: simple correlation and regression; Principal Axes factor analysis (both orthogonal and oblique rotations); RELATE (which directly compares with factor structures from two separate orthogonal analyses); the H-GROUP numerical taxonomy program; and two separate methods for hypothesis testing -- canonical correlation, and analysis of variance/chi-square. The environmental questionnaire was designed, to measure attitudes on scales which were roughly interval and thus amenable to parametric techniques.

 	The hypothesis testing and analysis phase revealed that personal and socio-economic characteristics (especially the latter) are strong correlates of human environmental attitudes. Experiential characteristics proved to be significantly weaker correlates of respondents' attitudes. The validity of the other three hypotheses was also shown. First, a number of statistically significant correlations exist between respondents' experiential characteristics on the one hand and their personal and socio-economic characteristics on the other. Second, a significant inverse linear relationship exists between satisfaction and importance attitude dimensions (environmental aspects which are judged most important are those aspects with which respondents are least satisfied, and vice versa), although this relationship is much stronger among the "academics" than among non-academic respondents. And third, a high degree of stability exists in the factor structures - different groups of respondents appear to cognitively group or associate environmental aspects in a highly similar fashion.

The future direction this research will take will be a systematic test of the specific strengths of the associations between human environmental attitudes and behavior.