Relating Environmental Attitudes and Contingent Values: A Comparison of Methods

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 weak-environmental beliefs. This paper provide an overview and comparison of three methodologies that may be applied to NEP survey data to identify environmental attitudinal groups: summated score, latent class analysis, 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. The robustness of these results across the different methods provides theoretical validation of the contingent valuation method.