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Connectedness to nature scale


The connectedness to nature scale (CNS) is a measure of individuals' trait levels of feeling emotionally connected to the natural world in the realm of social and environmental psychology. The CNS was “designed to tap an individual’s affective, experiential connection to nature.” The concept of connectedness to nature signifies the relationship between an individual and the environment. In brief, the scale intends to measure the level to which an individual feels connected with the natural world. Mayer and Frantz describe the CNS as a reliable, single-factored, multi-item scale that is easy to administer.

Environment sustainability includes concerns about the growth of the world’s population and the earth’s natural resources that may run out sooner than humanity is prepared for that to happen. Because environmental sustainability deals mostly with humans and the choices we make, psychologists can help in understanding the relationship between humans and their environment, as well as help devise changes that people would be willing to implement into their daily lives. According to Mayer and Frantz,ecologists argue that feeling connected to nature and caring about nature is a fundamental key in having people adopt positive environmental and ecological behaviors. They believe people must care about something if they want to help save it! According to Restall and Conrad, understanding how people form a relationship with nature and how this relationship impacts a person’s attitudes and behaviors towards the environment can help in formulating changes that, again, people will be willing to follow. This is exactly what the CNS intends to measure. In order to have people agree with changes made, the changes must align with what people believe, and the CNS aims to get at what people are feeling and believing about the environment.

Mayer and Frantz conducted five studies when they introduced the CNS. All five studies showed “strong evidence that the CNS is a reliable and valid scale.” The goals of Study 1 were to test if the items on the scale have internal consistency and to establish convergent and incremental validity. The original internal consistency was alpha=.72, but after dropping three items that had negative inter-item correlations, the internal consistency raised to alpha=.84. When controlling for a similar scale, the NEP, the CNS and lifestyle measures still had significant correlations, speaking to the validity of the CNS.


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