Environmental Attitude among Architecture Students in Kerala—Indian New Environmental Paradigm (I-NEP) Scale

The construction industry can be adjudged as a major contributor to the world’s environmental issues. Architects can address the adverse effects of the built environment through responsible design and sustainable development. This calls in for a need to review the current education system of architects to discover ways and means to imbibe a pro-ecological environmental attitude in the school of thoughts of student architects. In this context, it becomes very imperative to measure the Environmental Attitude of students of architecture. Dunlap and Van Liere’s New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale, developed in 1978, measures the general beliefs of humans toward their relationship with the environment, thus assessing the environmental attitude (EA). The applicability of the12-item NEP scale in the context of developing countries was examined by many researchers, due to the difference in worldviews, beliefs, and attitudes. This study utilizes the Indian Environmental Paradigm (I-NEP) scale, refined and developed by Khan et al. in 2012. It is a 9-item scale, designed from individual responses on a 5-point Likert scale. In this study, the I-NEP scale has been used to understand the environmental attitude of 200 students of the Department of Architecture at Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology, Government Engineering College, Kottayam, Kerala. High mean NEP scores suggest an ecocentric attitude of the students of Architecture. This indicates their enhanced sense of environmental consciousness and commitment toward preservation of natural resources. The statistical analysis verified the reliability and the dimensionality of the I-NEP scale.