Comparing different measures of affective attributes relating to sustainability |
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| Authors: | Kerry Shephard Nell Smith Lynley Deaker John Harraway Freya Broughton‐Ansin Sam Mann |
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| Institution: | 1. Higher Education Development Centre , University of Otago , Dunedin, New Zealand;2. Department of Mathematics and Statistics , University of Otago , Dunedin, New Zealand;3. Department of Information Technology , Otago Polytechnic , Dunedin, New Zealand |
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| Abstract: | A survey was developed to benchmark the affective sustainability characteristics of an incoming cohort of students in a Polytechnic in New Zealand, with the intention to monitor changes in these attributes as the students experience higher education over subsequent years. The survey contained a number of research instruments as we were interested in exploring how best to record these attributes. This article reports on the comparative efficacy of four of these instruments in describing the affective characteristics of the students. All the instruments depended on respondents’ self‐reporting in the absence of researchers or interviewers. The results do encourage us to have some confidence that students’ sustainability characteristics may be researched using a variety of survey‐based research instruments, and particular confidence in ongoing use of the Revised New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale. |
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| Keywords: | research methodology survey qualitative research quantitative research affective attributes |
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