New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP)

They are the original and revised versions of the same instrument. Dunlap and Van Liere's 1978 'New Environmental Paradigm' was a twelve-item scale measuring an emerging ecological worldview against the dominant growth-and-dominance outlook. The 2000 revision by Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, and Jones renamed it the 'New Ecological Paradigm,' expanded it to fifteen items covering five facets (limits to growth, anti-anthropocentrism, fragility of nature's balance, rejection of human exemptionalism, and possibility of ecocrisis), balanced the pro- and anti-ecological wording to reduce acquiescence bias, and updated outdated phrasing. The revised NEP is now the standard form used in most contemporary research.

It depends on the sample. Dunlap and colleagues designed five content facets and argued the scale can be treated as a coherent ecological worldview, often scored as a single total. However, factor analyses across studies sometimes recover multiple correlated dimensions and sometimes a single dominant factor, so the dimensionality is empirically unstable. Best practice is to examine the factor structure and reliability in your own data before deciding whether to use one overall score or facet subscales. Reporting Cronbach's alpha and a factor analysis, rather than assuming unidimensionality, is the standard expectation in current work.

Because the NEP measures a broad, general worldview, and general attitudes correspond only loosely with specific actions — a well-established principle of attitude-behavior research. A person can hold a strong ecological worldview yet face contextual barriers (cost, convenience, infrastructure) that block a particular behavior such as recycling or buying an electric car. This is exactly why theories like value-belief-norm and the attitude-behavior-context framework place the general worldview upstream and add more proximate beliefs, norms, and external conditions to explain behavior. The NEP is best used as a foundational predictor that shapes specific attitudes, not as a direct cause of any single behavior.