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Measurement of ecological behavior across different domains has been troublesome. The present paper argues that the lack of agreement in measuring general ecological behavior may be due to the measurement approach that is commonly used. An ecological behavior measure should be grounded on a probabilistic measurement approach that takes the important features of ecological behavior into consideration. Such a measure was developed in a survey study of 445 members of 2 Swiss transportation associations. Three types of ecological behavior measures were included: a general measure, 3 multiple‐item measures, and 3 single‐item measures. Results are controlled for social desirability effects. Reliability, internal consistency, and validity scores indicate that a probabilistic measurement approach can measure general ecological behavior accurately and unidimensionally.

In this paper, we contrast the value-belief-norm (VBN) model and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) for the first time regarding their ability to explain conservation behavior. The participants represent a convenience sample of 468 university students. Using survey data and adopting previously established compound measures, structural equation analyses revealed a remarkable explanatory power for both theories: TPB's intention accounted for 95% of people's conservation behavior and VBN's personal norms accounted for 64%. Compared to the VBN model, the TPB covered its concepts more hlly in terms of proportions of explained variance. More importantly, the fit statistics revealed that only the TPB depicts the relations among its concepts appropriately, whereas the VBN model does not.Pollution, energy use, and resource consumption fuel environmental, social, and economic transformations of uncertain gravity and may have disastrous consequences. To promote extensive behavioral change, psychologists and sociologists alike are exploring the factors associated with conservation behavior,