Because My Friends Insist or Because It Makes Sense? Adolescents’ Motivation towards the Environment

Abstract

Abstract:We present the results of a study that focuses in on issues of validity of the motivation towards the environment scale (MTES) in the context of Flanders (the Flemish-speaking community in Belgium). The instrument was developed almost two decades ago in Canada, and is designed to measure the self-determined motivation of people for performing pro-environmental behaviors, but has not yet been applied widely to different contexts. Here, we use a sample of 1730 grade 12 students from 71 schools across Flanders, to focus on specific issues concerning the validity of the MTES in the context of Flanders. We deal with its construct validity, through the estimation of a confirmatory factor analysis. Next, we test the reliability of the MTES and the hypothesized simplex structure by calculating intercorrelations between all six MTES subscales. External validity of the MTES is addressed by correlating the subscales to well-established environmental psychological constructs, such as the models of two major environmental values, the connectedness to nature scale, and the general ecological behavior scale. Finally, we also look at the discriminative validity of the MTES by testing gender differences in self-determined motivations towards the environment. Overall, our results confirm that the MTES is a valid and reliable instrument that can also be used outside the cultural context within which it was developed, to measure the diverse motivations of (young) people to engage in environmental behavior.

“Why (Should) I Do Something for the Environment?” Profiles of Flemish Adolescents’ Motivation Toward the Environment

“…Still, differences in strength of the different motivation types showed when comparing Canadian to Flemish populations. With the exception of integrated motivation in Villacorta and colleagues' [10], both Canadian studies [9,10] generally found higher intrinsic, integrated, and identified motivation than did Boeve-de Pauw and Van Petegem [16] in Flanders. Since our results were very much in line with the latter's, this may point to differences between Canada and Flanders.…”

“…Our results indicated higher amotivation than did Boeve-de Pauw and Van Petegem's, which may be due to an overrepresentation of male respondents in the current study. Still, bearing in mind that Boeve-de Pauw and Van Petegem [16] only found small to medium differences in amotivation between male and female respondents, this may only partially explain this difference.…”

“…Since the different types of regulation in SDT lie along a continuum of self-determination, subscales are expected to form a simplex pattern in which scales that are adjacent show a stronger positive correlation than scales that are theoretically more distant, eventually correlating negatively. The three types of motivation, i.e., intrinsic, extrinsic, and amotivation, have been widely confirmed within various domains, such as academic behavior [14,15], and motivation toward the environment [9,16,17]. Regardless of some breaches that were found in the simplex structure, the concepts of SDT have produced measuring scales.…”

“…Their research included development of the MTES, an instrument for assessing people's underlying motivation for environmental behavior [9]. The MTES was further validated by Villacorta et al [10], and more recently also by Boeve-de Pauw and Van Petegem [16].…”

“…This is in line with findings by several previous studies in academic motivation (e.g., [15,20,29,30]). In several of these domains, the simplex pattern was found to be flawed, mostly in the correlations between integrated, identified, and introjected regulations (e.g., [9,15,16,20,[29][30][31]). Several hypotheses were put forward in explanation.…”