Measurement of New Ecological Paradigm: Revision and Application of NEP Scale in China

This paper introduces contents of the New Ecological Paradigm（NEP）and its related researches, revises the NEP scale which is applied in environmental psychology and sociology, and tests the Chinese characteristic of the NEP. The reliability and validity of the NEP scale are good as an important tool of researching ecological values and ecological consciousness. 278 college students and 11 620 citizens participated in the investigation. Results of exploratory factor analysis show that there are two dimensions existed in the NEP scale in China, i.e. the New Environmental Paradigm and the Human Exceptionalism Paradigm. This twodimension model is supported by confirmatory factor analysis, and fit indices of the models are all above 0.90. The internal concordance coefficient of the NEP scale is 0.810, the splithalf reliability is 0.822, both of which meet the standard of the psychometrics. There are significant differences in genders, ages, education, resident place before 10 years old, and living years in present resident place among subjects. This study shows that the Chinese urban residents are gradually enhancing their ecological consciousness, cities in China are undergoing an ecological paradigm shift from traditional society paradigm to the new ecological paradigm.