Relating Environmental Ethical Attitudes and Contingent Valuation Responses Using Cluster Analysis, Latent Class Analysis, and the NEP: A Comparison

Environmental ethics and attitudes may be an important source of heterogeneity when considering the welfare effects and equity implications of policy changes dealing with environment and natural resources. The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale is a set of 15 likert questions and is intended to indicate whether an individual holds pro-environmental or anti-environmental beliefs. This paper provide an overview and comparison of three methodologies that may be applied to NEP survey data to detect environmental ethics groups: total NEP score, latent class analaysis, and cluster analysis methods. We find that while environmental attitudes do not significantly affect average willingness to pay measures, there are significant differences in willingness to pay across environmental attitude groups. The willingness to pay estimates for each attitudinal group are consistent across the different analystical measures.