A Five-Culture Validation of the Environmental Value-Bases Scale: A Measure of Instrumental, Intrinsic, and Relational Environmental Values

Previous research identified three reasons for valuing nature (i.e., the basis for seeing nature as valuable and important): (1) valuing nature for what it gives to humans (instrumental), (2) valuing nature for its own sake (intrinsic), and (3) valuing nature because of the relationship between people and nature (relational). Of these, relational value-bases have been less studied, especially in non-Western cultures. Using a large sample (n = 2618), with participants from five distinct cultural regions (Japan, Taiwan, Italy, France, USA), the present research tests whether a three-factor framework of environmental value-bases generalizes to other cultures. Our findings demonstrate the configural and metric invariance of the recently validated Environmental Value-Bases Scale, indicating that the latent constructs generalize across sub-samples of the five regions and that the measure can be used to test associations between the value-bases and outcomes across cultures. However, we only found partial scalar invariance, suggesting (a) that caution is needed when comparing scale means between cultures and (b) that such tests are most appropriately performed using latent means. This research further contributes to the growing value-basis literature by comparing the latent means for each value-basis between and within each of the five regions and by demonstrating their associations with place attachment.