Relationship Among College Affiliation and Other Factors to Environmental Beliefs

The objective of this research is to determine and define the relationship among student’s college within Winona State University and other demographic factors, to their beliefs and aptitudes regarding the environment. This was accomplished by a survey disturbed to students, asking demographic questions and the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale. The NEP scale is a previously created set of fifteen questions, which aims to measure individual’s environmental concern and attitude. These questions were asked with a rating scale of answers, measuring level or agreement or disagreement. Data collection and analysis is still currently underway. It is hypothesized there will be correlations to new paradigm views in students in science related colleges and those having taken an environmentally related course. The roles of gender, socioeconomic status, and year in school were additionally analyzed.