'Green' questionnaire allegedly helps predict how consumers buy environmentally friendly products

A remarkably naive piece of attitude research below.  The researchers have taken no account of acquiescent bias, social desirability bias or social class bias.  They are psychometrically illiterate.  What their finding imply, if anything, is that Green acolytes are mostly middle class and therefore tend to exhibit other middle class charateristics.   Another howler from phys.org.  Excerpt below

How do consumers decide when faced with the option of buying a traditional product or a competing product that is marketed as 'green?'  Penn State Smeal College of Business faculty member Karen Winterich and her colleagues set out to develop a scale of 'green consumption values'

The define "green " as the tendency of to express the value of environmental protection through the goods and services they purchase. To measure those values, researchers developed a six-item measure they call the GREEN scale, consisting of the following statements:

  • It is important to me that the products I use do not harm the environment.
  • I consider the potential environmental impact of my actions when making many of my decisions.
  • My purchase habits are affected by my concern for the environment.
  • I am concerned about wasting the resources of our planet.
  • I would describe myself as environmentally responsible.
  • I am willing to be inconvenienced in order to take actions that are more .


"Our primary goal is to develop a concise measure of exclusively green consumption values, as opposed to broader attitudes toward socially responsible behavior or environmental consciousness," the researchers wrote in an article to be published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

In applying the GREEN scale across a series of six studies, the researchers also found that green consumption values tend to exist within a larger network of ideas and beliefs about conservation.

"We demonstrate that green consumption values are strongly related to the careful use of not just collective, environmental resources, but also personal resources," the researchers wrote. "That is, both the tendency to use financial resources wisely . and the tendency to use physical resources wisely . are positively correlated with green consumption values."

In other words, consumers that value green consumption also tend to value financial savings and reuse and repurpose goods rather than quickly disposing of them. Consumers with this set of values may experience some conflict if environmentally friendly products are more expensive or less effective than their traditional counterparts. How do consumers resolve this?

SOURCE


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