Compare methods

	Cultural Theory of Risk (Grid-Group Worldview Measurement)	New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP)
Field	Environmental Sociology	Environmental Sociology
Family	Latent structure	Latent structure
Year of origin	1982	2000
Originator	Mary Douglas & Aaron Wildavsky; Karl Dake	Riley E. Dunlap & Kent D. Van Liere; revised by Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig & Jones
Type	Worldview-scale measurement of risk selection	Psychometric scale of ecological worldview
Seminal source	Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. (1982). Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520044913	Dunlap, R. E., Van Liere, K. D., Mertig, A. G., & Jones, R. E. (2000). New Trends in Measuring Environmental Attitudes: Measuring Endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A Revised NEP Scale. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 425-442.
Aliases	Grid-Group Cultural Theory, Cultural Worldviews of Risk, Dake Cultural Bias Scales, Douglas-Wildavsky Risk Theory	NEP Scale, Revised NEP Scale, New Environmental Paradigm Scale, Ecological Worldview Scale
Related	3	3
Summary	The cultural theory of risk holds that what people fear is selected by their way of life rather than by objective danger, and it measures this by scaling respondents' cultural worldviews and relating them to the hazards they choose to worry about. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky advanced the theory in their 1982 book Risk and Culture, arguing that environmental and technological dangers are picked out to defend particular social arrangements. Karl Dake operationalized it in 1991, building survey scales for the grid-group worldviews — hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism — and showing that these 'orienting dispositions' predict risk concerns better than knowledge or personality. The framework explains, for instance, why egalitarians dread environmental and technological risks that they read as products of inequitable, irresponsible institutions, while individualists downplay them. As a method it combines worldview measurement with risk-rating data, testing whether cultural bias structures the perception of danger. It complements the psychometric paradigm by explaining who fears what and why.	The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale is the most widely used survey instrument for measuring an individual's general ecological worldview — the degree to which they see humanity as part of, and constrained by, a fragile and finite natural environment. Riley Dunlap and Kent Van Liere introduced the original New Environmental Paradigm in 1978 to capture the emerging post-materialist environmental consciousness, and Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, and Jones published the revised 15-item NEP scale in 2000, broadening its content and balancing pro- and anti-ecological items. Respondents rate agreement with statements about the balance of nature, limits to growth, anti-anthropocentrism, the fragility of nature's balance, and the possibility of an ecological crisis. Summing the balanced items yields a score of how strongly a person endorses an ecological versus a dominant social paradigm. The scale functions as a foundational worldview measure that predicts more specific environmental beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, and it anchors much of quantitative environmental sociology.