The adaptation study of the ecocentric, anthropocentric and antipathhetic attitudes toward environment

Problem Statement: The results of today's studies show that the most important reason of the environmental problem is human being. For this reason researchers who study about environment try to find out the answers of some questions. Do the human beings develop ethical characteristics to the environment? What kind of dilemma do they feel? What are the different approaches between egocentric and anthropocentric attitudes? What kind of things can be done for identifying these approaches? The adaptation of the attitude scale into Turkish will become a need for answering these questions.Purpose of the Study: The purpose of the study is to adapt the Egocentric and Anthropocentric and Antipathetic Attitude Scale which is first developed by Thompson and Barton (1994) and later adapted to German by Siegrist (1996). The universe of the study is Ankara city which is from Turkiye. Subgroup of this study is 250 teachers. 69.4% of these teachers are female and 30.6% of these teachers are male. 50% of the teachers are classroom teachers, 13.3% of them are specific area teachers, and 36.7% of them are biology and chemistry teachers from high schools. The scale which measures Egocentric, anthropocentric and negative attitudes towards environment was firstly developed by Thompson and Barton (1994) in United States. After it was adapted to German by Siegrist in 1996. This scale was firstly adapted to Turkish and used in this study. Cronbach alpha value of econcentric attitudes is found .77, Cronbach alpha value of anthropocentric attitudes is found .78 and Cronbach alpha value of negative attitudes towards environment is found .92.This study was conducted in autumn period with teachers from 23 schools in Ankara. From 280 teachers, 30 teachers did not give feedback to the scale. Schools which have different characteristics such as socio-economic status, place were selected to represent the general and all these schools are public.Findings and Results: It is found that the adaptation of Egocentric and Anthropocentric and Antipathetic Attitude Scale will help the other research studies in our country.Conclusions and Recommendations: After these studies, the reasons of thinking approaches and negative attitudes towards environment can be included in the other research studies. These kinds of research studies can be conducted by using this scale in different countries and the differences and similarities about environmental protection attitudes and behaviors between countries can be identified. This scale which is used for measuring attitudes towards environment can be recommended to select and use in western countries in socio-psychology areas.