Environmental Dispositions among School-Age Children

Abstract

The Children's Environmental Response Inventory (CERI) is introduced as a means of measuring environmental disposition, or what has been termed "environmental personality." This test is shown to have sound psychometric properties. It has been administered to a large sample of school-age children in the age range 9 to 16 years. Differences are found among responses to the eight domains: Pastoralism, Urbanism, Environmental Adaptation, Stimulus Seeking, Environmental Trust, Antiquarianism, Need Privacy, and Mechanical Orientation. Associations are found between individual dispositions and extracurricular activities. Differences related to personal status characteristics-age, sex, and geographic place of residence-suggest that there are important variations in the acquisition of environmental disposition.

Investigating Environmental Identity, Well-Being, and Meaning

“…Specii cally, we proposed of nature have been shown to predict proenvironmental beliefs (Ewert, Place, Sibthorpe, 2005;Lohr & Pearson-Mims, 2005), and people with a rural childhood have been found to have more positive orientations toward the natural environment than those with an urban childhood (Bunting & Cousins, 1985;Hinds & Sparks, 2008). It has also been suggested that it is the emotional attachments that people form through experiential encounters with nature that are instrumental in developing commitments to nature (Milton, 2002).…”

Environmental attitude shifts as revealed by landscape tastes and activity preferences

“…attitudes and motivations. In most cases the observation and analysis of environmental attitudes has been undertaken employing questionnaires (Whyte, 1977;McKechnie, 1974;Bunting and Semple, 1979), and of these the environmental response inventory (ERI) (McKechnie, 1977;1978) and the children's environmental response inventory (CERI) (Bunting and Semple, 1979;Bunting and Cousins, 1985) stand out. These, and similar questionnaires, are extensively applied.…”

Natural spaces – how do they influence stewardship attitudes and actions of university students?

“…8,13,15,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. The development of an environmental ethic may not require visits to what the child perceives as 'natural spaces' since experience, even within natural spaces of a schoolyard, help in the development of environmental concern [38,43,44]. Children may also be exposed to natural spaces in association with sporting activities, playing in the local reserve or taking a shortcut through nearby bushland.…”