Users' views of hospital environmental quality: Validation of the Perceived Hospital Environment Quality Indicators (PHEQIs)

Environmental Quality Perception (EQP) is an important construct used to help to understand the relationship between people and the hospital environment. From a patient-centered care perspective, it is important that hospital design take into account the patients' (and other users') point of view. This paper presents the adaptation and validation of a measure of hospital EQP, the Perceived Hospital Environment Quality Indicators (PHEQIs; Fornara, Bonaiuto, & Bonnes, 2006), and seeks to confirm the factor structure of this construct in a different cultural context. Three scales, two focusing on physical environments and one evaluating the social environment, were completed by 562 users of four orthopedic units in Portuguese hospitals, two older and two recently built or renovated. To assess criterion validity, hospital physical environments were also objectively evaluated by two architects. Using a confirmatory factor analysis the three validation procedures produced acceptable fit indices in the final measurement models. Overall reliability values were satisfactory, as was the evidence for criterion validity. PHEQIs scales and factors correlated with global evaluation of the environment, supporting concurrent criterion validity; and predictive criterion validity was demonstrated given that users of older and newer hospitals differed significantly on the perception of quality of hospital EQP, and that high congruence between users' and experts' evaluations was found. Discriminant construct validity was supported, and some difficulties in showing convergent validity are discussed in terms of item formulation adequacy. Implications for research and practice are described.     

Questions and answers. TQEM performance indicators—how do you measure up?

I have seen a number of corporations accept the philosophy of TQEM and start the process of total quality environmental management with great enthusiasm. I believe that many organizations are attracted because TQM principles demand measurements of success and results that are definable for the environment. It reduces the emotionalism that frequently tends to surround environmental issues. Emotionalism has perhaps been the bane and boon of efforts by corporations and advocacy groups to incorporate environmental issues into the day-to-day functions of organizations. Abt Associates, a well-known research-based consulting firm, recently completed a study of U.S. Fortune 250 firms' environmental management programs. Abt found evidence that environmental performance is a competitive issue. Benchmarking is hotly pursued to develop firm-wide indices of performance. One third of the benchmarking is against competition, another third is against worldwide firms. There is a race to develop “Best in Class” standards now. E2M and Abt Associates have combined resources to study corporate Canada's environmental management programs and compare these with those of the United States. This research will help companies benchmark activities and will build a strong North American data base. Unfortunately it will not be ready in time to answer TQEM's question for this issue. (The study results will be released to participating companies in Fall 1992.)     

Measuring knowledge of indoor environmental hazards

People spend most of their time indoors, where air pollution levels rival and often exceed those outdoors for a number of important pollutants. Yet, little is known about people’s knowledge of indoor environmental hazards. The purpose of the current study was to construct a measure of indoor environmental knowledge. A set of 78 true/false items were developed with input from a panel of experts. The set of items was truncated with traditional item analyses, resulting in a reliable set of 21 items (α = .79). Concurrent validity was established by a significant correlation between the indoor environmental knowledge (IEK) scale and an established measure of science literacy (r = 0.44, p < .001). Schema theory guided the assumption that the two measures should be related. Convergent validity was established by the significant regression of science literacy, formal education in science and math, and status as an engineering student on IEK scale score, accounting for 25% of the variance in the IEK scale score. Future research avenues are proposed and limitations are discussed.     

Can you be bothered? The role of participant motivation in the valuation of species conservation measures

Group-based approaches to the elicitation of stated preferences are considered particularly suitable for valuing unfamiliar or complex environmental goods. While such exercises provide participants with detailed information and time to think and deliberate, they require a considerable degree of motivation from the respondents. Effects of motivation on willingness to pay (WTP) tend to be ignored within the valuation research community, although similar effects have been reported in psychological literature. In this study, a novel approach using video recordings and behaviour coding of participants in group-based Market Stall meetings was employed to measure motivation as well as its impact on WTP and the theoretical and convergent validity of stated WTP. Indicators of motivation correlated significantly with both WTP statements and their validity, with more motivated individuals stating higher and more valid bids. These findings suggest that the recognition of motivation is an important novel element of research into stated preferences, particularly with respect to usefulness and quality of WTP measures.     

PERSPECTIVES ON ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND ITS MANAGEMENT: EXAMPLES FROM FOREST HYDROLOGY1

ABSTRACT: This paper uses the varying perspectives of researchers, funders, users or purchasers, and the wider community of stakeholders who have an interest in the outcome of research, to describe the socio-economic and organizational context in which forest hydrology research, as a particular form of environmental science, is carried out. The kinds of products from research, and the outcomes from research desired by these different parties are discussed. Implications for research organizations, their research strategies, and for the researchers within those organizations are discussed using the Porter-Harvard model of the context for the competitive strategies of enterprises. Some possible implications for research funding, research management, career paths for researchers, and the initial and lifetime education/learning needs of researchers and their managers are suggested. These considerations and implications are then related to the kinds of knowledge, skills, experience, and behaviors which are likely to be needed for a 21st century career in environmental research.     

The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature

Five studies assessed the validity and reliability of the connectedness to nature scale (CNS), a new measure of individuals’ trait levels of feeling emotionally connected to the natural world. Data from two community and three college samples demonstrated that the CNS has good psychometric properties, correlates with related variables (the new environmental paradigm scale, identity as an environmentalist), and is uncorrelated with potential confounds (verbal ability, social desirability). This paper supports ecopsychologists’ contention that connection to nature is an important predictor of ecological behavior and subjective well-being. It also extends social psychological research on self–other overlap, perspective taking, and altruistic behavior to the overlap between self and nature. The CNS promises to be a useful empirical tool for research on the relationship between humans and the natural world.     

Watershed Management and Organizational Dynamics: Nationwide Findings and Regional Variation

Recent attention has focused on resource management initiatives at the watershed scale with emphasis on collaborative, locally driven, and decentralized institutional arrangements. Existing literature on limited selections of well-established watershed-based organizations has provided valuable insights. The current research extends this focus by including a broad survey of watershed organizations from across the United States as a means to estimate a national portrait. Organizational characteristics include year of formation, membership size and composition, budget, guiding principles, and mechanisms of decision-making. These characteristics and the issue concerns of organizations are expected to vary with respect to location. Because this research focuses on organizations that are place based and stakeholder driven, the forces driving them are expected to differ across regions of the country. On this basis of location, we suggest basic elements for a regional assessment of watershed organizations to channel future research and to better approximate the organizational dynamics, issue concerns, and information needs unique to organizations across the country. At the broadest level, the identification of regional patterns or organizational similarities may facilitate the linkage among organizations to coordinate their actions at the much broader river basin or ecosystem scale.     

Measuring love and care for nature

This study aimed to develop a psychometrically sound measure of the construct of love and deep caring for nature as an expression of people’s personal and explicitly emotional relationship with nature. Expert opinion and pre-pilot surveys were employed for refinement of the item pool, and a sample of 307 university students was used in a major pilot study aiming to further purify scale items. A field trial was conducted using a sample of 261 tourists at leisure with nature. The final 15-item Love and Care for Nature (LCN) scale is differentiated from established measures of similar constructs, and demonstrates high internal consistency and sound validity. This research extends the psychological frameworks of environmental altruism, and has also taken the philosophical concept of biophilia, as love for nature, into the operational realm by making it perceptible and measurable.     

Mineral economics: Overview of a discipline

Mineral economics is the academic discipline that investigates and promotes understanding of economic and policy issues associated with the production and use of mineral commodities. While its origins can be traced back at least 200 years to the writings of David Ricardo and other early Classical economists, it emerged as a separate academic field only after World War II and then primarily in the United States. As a separate academic discipline, its roots are found in mining schools that needed to consider the milieu in which minerals are sold. While geologists, mining engineers, and others with technical backgrounds were largely responsible for creating the first stand-alone mineral-economics programs, ultimately trained economists became participants as well. Moreover, even after the rise of mineral-economics departments, most of the research in the field continued and continues to be carried out in other academic units, including traditional economic departments and engineering schools, as well as in government agencies, nonprofit research organizations, consulting firms, and international organizations.     

Urban visual air quality judgments: Reliability and validity

A procedure based on judgments of human observers for measuring visual air quality in urban areas is described, and its reliability and validity are examined using the results of several studies conducted in a metropolitan area. It is concluded that the procedure provides a measure that is sufficiently reliable and valid to warrant its use in studies of the causes and consequences of changes in visual air quality. Substantial agreement was found among individuals with regard to judgments of visual air quality, but the possibility of differences between experienced and inexperienced observers requires further investigation. The paper provides an example of methods that can be used, and issues that should be addressed, in the development of perceived environmental quality indices.     

Organizational commitment to integrated and collaborative management: matching strategies to constraints

Integrated and collaborative approaches to environmental management are being advocated as a more appropriate and effective approach to decision-making. It is based on collaboration among a range of individuals and organizations that have a stake, role, or responsibility in management outcomes. However, researchers have found that implementation of this approach has encountered difficulties. This paper focuses on the role of organizations and their commitment to implementation. Based on case study and survey research in the United States and Australia, the author examines organizational constraints and the range of strategies used to secure commitment. It is argued that participants must more explicitly address the commitment issue and design implementation strategies that respond to organizational constraints.     

Does adding more lettuce make a hamburger truly green? A metaphor behind the green movement paradigm in designing cities

In designing cities, the label of the green movement these days is being applied to almost everything—starting from works of environmental non-governmental organizations and international as well as local conservation organizations to grass-roots resistance activism including radical environmentalism. This paper seeks to understand the motivation—the paradigm—behind the green movement initiatives and how the paradigm appears to shift from the ground reality. Conclusions suggest that, on one hand, environmental problems are far from being a matter of common sense and, on the other, the matter of intellectual and technological developments—the outcomes of rigorous academic research reflected in endless literature predominantly comprising the fields of environmental sociology, environmental anthropology, and conservation psychology—are in reality often found to be dealt with by shallow planning and policy practices without even realizing the big-picture that the paradigm is merely being used as an advertizing tool for making business profit. It is expected that, unless a shift from such negative practices towards a conscious and genuine commitment to proactive environmental stewardship is made, the situation will continue to be exacerbated.     

Territoriality,defensible space and residential burglary: An environmental analysis

Previous research on territoriality suggests that territorial intrusion is associated with particular territorial demarcations. In the present study the use of territorial displays involving symbolic barriers, actual barriers, detectability, traces and social climate is related to the territorial intrusion of residential burglary. The five classes of territorial displays were assessed for a total of 306 burglarized houses on burglarized blocks, non-burglarized houses on burglarized blocks, and non-burglarized houses on non-burglarized blocks. After the data were reduced through factor analysis, multiple regression analysis revealed that burglarized houses differed from non-burglarized houses on non-burglarized blocks on four of the five classes of territorial displays. In general, burglarized houses had salient public territorial qualities: cues of openness and unoccupied appearance. In contrast, the non-burglarized houses had salient secondary or primary territorial qualities: territorial markers communicating privacy and individuality. In addition, non-burglarized houses had greater visual contact with neighboring houses.     

A Framework for Assessing Collaborative Capacity in Community-Based Public Forest Management

Community-based collaborative groups involved in public natural resource management are assuming greater roles in planning, project implementation, and monitoring. This entails the capacity of collaborative groups to develop and sustain new organizational structures, processes, and strategies, yet there is a lack of understanding what constitutes collaborative capacity. In this paper, we present a framework for assessing collaborative capacities associated with community-based public forest management in the US. The framework is inductively derived from case study research and observations of 30 federal forest-related collaborative efforts. Categories were cross-referenced with literature on collaboration across a variety of contexts. The framework focuses on six arenas of collaborative action: (1) organizing, (2) learning, (3) deciding, (4) acting, (5) evaluating, and (6) legitimizing. Within each arena are capacities expressed through three levels of social agency: individuals, the collaborative group itself, and participating or external organizations. The framework provides a language and set of organizing principles for understanding and assessing collaborative capacity in the context of community-based public forest management. The framework allows groups to assess what capacities they already have and what more is needed. It also provides a way for organizations supporting collaboratives to target investments in building and sustaining their collaborative capacities. The framework can be used by researchers as a set of independent variables against which to measure collaborative outcomes across a large population of collaborative efforts.     

Structuring cooperative behavior under the National Environmental Policy Act of the United States

A trend is presently under way to streamline the compliance requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of the United States through cooperative assessment procedures. Since the law was enacted in 1970, however, participants in the assessment process have tended to settle disagreements by adversarial rather than cooperative means. This study focuses on a highly acclaimed environmental assessment procedure undertaken by the U.S. Steel Corporation for its proposed $4.0 billion Lakefront Steel Plant. Survey research data were gathered to measure the underlying management philosophy perceived by interorganizational representatives, who attended a series of Technical Team meetings designed to coordinate the assessment effort and to open communication channels. A social psychological scale of behavioral dimensions was adapted from Likert to define the composition and the extent of cooperation at these meetings. A newly constructed scale was used to measure the quantity and quality of representation by each of the major organizations involved. Informal interviews were conducted with project participants to obtain further insight into member interaction. Results indicate that democratic problem solving was in evidence but also suggest a preference by respondents for improved procedures. The paper outlines areas of concern voiced by respondents and offers the means for improving the operating procedures of similar interorganizational environmental assessments.     

Water Quality Improvement Policies: Lessons Learned from the Implementation of Proposition O in Los Angeles,California

This article evaluates the implementation of Proposition O, a stormwater cleanup measure, in Los Angeles, California. The measure was intended to create new funding to help the city comply with the Total Maximum Daily Load requirements under the federal Clean Water Act. Funding water quality objectives through a bond measure was necessary because the city had insufficient revenues to deploy new projects in its budget. The bond initiative required a supermajority vote (two-thirds of the voters), hence the public had to be convinced that such funding both was necessary and would be effective. The bond act language included project solicitation from the public, as well as multiple benefit objectives. Accordingly, nonprofit organizations mobilized to present projects that included creating new parks, using schoolyards for flood control and groundwater recharge, and replacing parking lots with permeable surfaces, among others. Yet few, if any, of these projects were retained for funding, as the city itself also had a list of priorities and higher technical expertise in justifying them as delivering water quality improvements. Our case study of the implementation of Proposition O points to the potentially different priorities for the renovation of urban infrastructure that are held by nonprofit organizations and city agencies and the importance of structuring public processes clearly so that there are no misimpressions about funding and implementation responsibilities that can lead to disillusionment with government, especially under conditions of fiscal constraints.     

Gender analysis and international financial institutions

The following article is an attempt to reconcile the opinions of various activist-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on the use of gender analysis as a policy tool in the field of international development and macroeconomic policy. Of special concern to the author is the evolving relationship between international financial institutions (IFIs) and grassroots environmental NGOs seeking reform in macroeconomic policy initiation, implementation and evaluation. The ideas presented below are those of the author alone, and are solely intended to facilitate dialogue between the aforementioned parties as an alternative to the characteristic set of untenable demands and concomitant uncompromising resistance. Thus stated, the reader is challenged to remove his/her professional hat to accept or reject the validity of the propositions with an equal proportion of reason and intuition.     

The state of bird and nature protection in Croatia

Summary Croatia, as a Mediterranean country in the south-eastern part of Europe, is an area with a characteristic flora and fauna. The ornithofauna of Croatia reflects that it is a breeding area for some of the globally endangered bird species, as well as a site for the spring/autumn passage and the wintering of European migratory birds. Many ornithologically significant localities are designated and there are 20 ornithological reserves and four wetland sites that are on the list of the Ramsar Convention.In Croatia, there are four governmental organizations dealing with scientific research on birds of which the Institute for Ornithology of the Croatian Academy, of Sciences and Arts is that with the longest tradition. There are also many non-governmental organizations dedicated to the protection of environment, but only the Croatian Society for Bird and Nature Protection is dedicated mostly to bird protection. There are not many sources of funding for research and the protection of birds; the chief source being the Ministry of Sciences and Technology of the Republic of Croatia.Croatia has to establish new legislation according to European criteria and The Hunting Law, The Nature Protection Law and The Environment Protection Law have been recently accepted in Parliament. International Conventions, such as Bern, Bonn and Washington, have yet to be adopted. Foreign, hunting tourism, especially organized by fishpond authorities, is believed to be killing large numbers of protected water birds. A red data book exists only for plants and mammals and this makes biological assessments difficult.With the end of military operations and the reintegration of the occupied areas of Croatia, an assessment of the damage to the national parks and nature reserves, and to nature in general, will be necessary. Bird and nature conservation in Croatia remains promising, provided the legal control of the Croatian government over the occupied parts of the country is restored soon and international organizations give assistance.Dr Jasmina Muini is Croatian by birth and she has studied in Paris, Oslo, and Zagred where she gained her PhD. She is a President of the Croatian Society for Bird and Nature Protection, a member of the Croatian Parliament Board for Environmental Protection, vice-president of the Scientific Council of the Zoological Garden in Zagreb, and a member of other Croatian environmental bodies. She is a leading authority on the ornithofauna of the Croatian wetlands.     

Measuring Biotechnology Employees’ Ethical Attitudes towards a Controversial Transgenic Cattle Project: The Ethical Valence Matrix

What is the relationship between biotechnology employees’ beliefs about the moral outcomes of a controversial transgenic research project and their attitudes of acceptance towards the project? To answer this question, employees (n=466) of a New Zealand company, AgResearch Ltd., were surveyed regarding a project to create transgenic cattle containing a synthetic copy of the human myelin basic protein gene (hMBP). Although diversity existed amongst employees’ attitudes of acceptance, they were generally: in favor of the project, believed that it should be allowed to proceed to completion, and that it is acceptable to use transgenic cattle to produce medicines for humans. These three items were aggregated to form a project acceptance score. Scales were developed to measure respondents’ beliefs about the moral outcomes of the project for identified stakeholders in terms of the four principles of common morality (benefit, non-harm, justice, and autonomy). These data were statistically aggregated into an Ethical Valence Matrix for the project. The respondents’ project Ethical Valence Scores correlated significantly with their project acceptance scores (r=0.64, p<0.001), accounting for 41% of the variance in respondents’ acceptance attitudes. Of the four principles, non-harm had the strongest correlation with attitude to the project (r=0.59), followed by benefit and justice (both r=0.54), then autonomy (r=0.44). These results indicate that beliefs about the moral outcomes of a research project, in terms of the four principles approach, are strongly related to, and may be significant determinants of, attitudes to the research project. This suggests that, for employees of a biotechnology organization, ethical reasoning could be a central mechanism for the evaluation of the acceptability of a project. We propose that the Ethical Valence Matrix may be used as a tool to measure ethical attitudes towards controversial issues, providing a metric for comparison of perceived ethical consequences for multiple stakeholder groups and for the evaluation and comparison of the ethical consequences of competing alternative issues or projects. The tool could be used to measure both public and special interest groups’ ethical attitudes and results used for the development of socially responsible policy or by science organizations as a democratizing decision aid to selection amongst projects competing for scarce research funds.     

The organization of integrated environmental research in The Netherlands

This article presents new concepts for the organization of increasingly complex environmental research activities on the institutional, the national, or the international level. An environmental research cycle with four phases, similar to the industrial product cycle, is described, and its implications in managing the interface between research, policy making, and enforcement are depicted. Furthermore, five main themes of future environmental research are proposed, including advanced analytical methods, environmental monitoring, an environmental management information system (EMIS), and the development of ecological targets at a national and a global level. The specific tasks of universities, private organizations, and governmental institutions in the total environmental research area are defined and a structure is proposed to develop collaborative networks.