Sustainable Consumption Values Scale (SCVS)

1. Abstract

The Sustainable Consumption Values Scale (SCVS), also widely known in consumer psychology and psychometrics as the Green Consumption Values (GCV) Scale, was conceptualized and rigorously validated by Kelly L. Haws, Karen Page Winterich, and Rebecca Walker Naylor (2014). The instrument provides an empirically validated, parsimonious measurement tool designed to assess an individual’s enduring tendency to express personal values concerning environmental protection specifically through consumer purchase, acquisition, and consumption behaviors. While traditional ecological awareness scales predominantly evaluate abstract political, planetary, or biosocial attitudes, the SCVS captures the unique, actionable intersection where environmental consciousness governs economic trade-offs, resource conservation, and product evaluations.

Constructed as a unidimensional 6-item instrument administered via a standard 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”), the scale measures core facets of consumer decision-making, including perceived environmental impact, purchase habit alteration, resource waste aversion, ecological identity, and behavioral willingness to bear inconvenience. Psychometric evaluation across six comprehensive experimental and correlational studies established exceptional internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently ranging from 0.88 to 0.93 across diverse demographic samples. Exploratory factor analyses and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate robust single-factor dimensionality with high factor loadings (exceeding 0.70 across all items) and superior model fit indices (CFI > 0.98, RMSEA < 0.05). Furthermore, the scale demonstrates rigorous convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity, distinguishing green consumption values from socially desirable responding, broad environmental concern, and generalized frugality, while robustly predicting willingness to pay price premiums, actual product choices, and downstream evaluations of non-environmental product attributes through a motivated cognition lens.

2. Keywords

Sustainable Consumption Values Scale, Green Consumption Values, Psychometrics, Consumer Psychology, Pro-environmental Behavior, Environmental Attitudes, Motivated Reasoning, Value-Belief-Norm Theory, Scale Validation, Sustainable Marketing

3. Authors

The Sustainable Consumption Values Scale was developed and published by a team of prominent consumer behavior and marketing scholars:

• Kelly L. Haws, Ph.D. — Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker, Jr. Professor of Marketing, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Dr. Haws specializes in consumer behavior, consumer self-control, decision-making, and pro-social or health-related consumption choices.
• Karen Page Winterich, Ph.D. — Gerald I. Susman Professor in Sustainability and Professor of Marketing, Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States. Dr. Winterich’s research examines consumer identity, social responsibility, charitable giving, and post-consumer circular economy behaviors.
• Rebecca Walker Naylor, Ph.D. — Thomas C. Page Professor of Marketing, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, United States. Dr. Naylor investigates consumer social interactions, word-of-mouth dynamics, and consumer responsiveness to sustainable and innovative product attributes.

Correspondence regarding the original development and validation studies was coordinated through the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Marketing Research.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Sustainable Consumption Values Scale is to quantify an enduring, individual-difference construct representing the extent to which consumers value environmental protection and resource preservation within the specific domain of market-based consumption decisions. Prior to the development of the SCVS by Haws, Winterich, and Naylor (2014), researchers relied heavily on broad environmental attitudinal batteries, such as the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) or generic socio-altruistic concern scales. While these macro-level inventories accurately captured generalized sociopolitical worry about climate change, biodiversity loss, or planetary carrying capacity, they systematically exhibited weak predictive utility when forecasting microeconomic market actions, specific retail brand selections, or product attribute trade-offs—a persistent discrepancy widely known in psychometrics and marketing as the “attitude-behavior gap” or “green gap.”

The SCVS addresses this gap by isolating the operational psychological construct designated as green consumption values. Green consumption values are not merely abstract environmental convictions; they constitute an internalized evaluative standard that directly motivates and structures purchasing decisions. The scale explicitly measures whether consumers consider the negative externalities of products, alter habitual shopping selections in favor of ecologically benign alternatives, manifest anxiety regarding resource exhaustion, adopt an explicit self-concept of environmental stewardship, and willingly accept personal inconveniences—such as reduced functionality, aesthetic compromises, or logistical effort—to consume sustainably.

In empirical research contexts, the SCVS serves as a moderator or focal independent variable in studies investigating sustainable consumer behavior, eco-label credibility, circular economy adoption, product life-cycle preferences, and motivated reasoning. Haws and colleagues demonstrated that individuals exhibiting high green consumption values view eco-friendly products through “green-tinted glasses”—engaging in motivated cognitive processing whereby the presence of an environmental attribute causes them to perceive non-environmental attributes (e.g., product efficacy, performance, taste, durability) as superior. In clinical, organizational, and behavioral policy settings, the scale provides sustainability analysts and behavioral economists with an objective, validated diagnostic tool to segment target populations, assess intervention efficacy, and predict responsiveness to institutional green transition policies.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct operationalized by the instrument is Green Consumption Values (GCV), defined as the tendency to express the value of environmental protection through one’s purchases and consumption behaviors. Rather than treating ecological concern as an undifferentiated, multi-tiered attitude, the SCVS conceptualizes this value as an integrated, unidimensional belief system centered on economic and resource exchange. Within this overarching latent dimension, several psychological facets operate concurrently:

External Ecological Impact Assessment

Consumers possessing strong sustainable consumption values exhibit chronic cognitive activation regarding the downstream physical consequences of their market choices. This facet evaluates the internal demand that personal consumption must avoid harming biophysical ecosystems. Rather than passively expecting regulatory frameworks or corporate compliance to manage pollution, the consumer assumes personal agency, evaluating a product’s footprint throughout its life cycle—from material extraction and manufacturing toxicity to packaging biodegradability.

Behavioral Modification of Habitual Purchasing

Values are distinguished from theoretical attitudes by their behavioral regulatory function. The SCVS captures the extent to which environmental concern translates from an affective state into proceduralized habits. High-scoring individuals actively reconstruct their habitual retail scripts, systematically seeking out certified organic, fair-trade, recycled, or energy-efficient goods, and penalizing brands associated with corporate environmental irresponsibility.

Aversion to Global Resource Depletion

Rooted psychologically in loss aversion and conservation ethics, this facet measures cognitive and emotional distress regarding planetary overconsumption and entropy. It reflects a normative rejection of disposable, hyper-consumerist models. The individual exhibits psychological vigilance against waste, recognizing the finite thermodynamic boundaries of global ecosystems and viewing excessive consumption as fundamentally unethical.

Ecological Identity and Self-Schema Integration

According to identity theory, an individual’s self-concept dictates domain-specific behavioral consistency. The SCVS evaluates the degree to which an individual explicitly self-identifies as “environmentally responsible.” When environmental stewardship is embedded within the core self-schema, behaving sustainably becomes a mechanism for self-verification, whereas engaging in wasteful consumption induces cognitive dissonance and identity-incongruent discomfort.

Willingness to Incur Personal Inconvenience

The definitive psychological boundary separating mild environmental sympathy from genuine sustainable consumption values is the readiness to pay personal costs. Most consumers endorse environmental protection in zero-cost, abstract contexts. The SCVS measures whether the consumer is willing to bear actual transactional, temporal, physical, or operational inconveniences—such as walking farther to deposit compostable packaging, adjusting home climate settings, cleaning reusable containers, or researching obscure supply chains—in order to execute pro-environmental choices.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Sustainable Consumption Values Scale integrates principles from cognitive psychology, social value orientation, and consumer behavioral economics:

Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) Theory

The foundational underpinning of the SCVS aligns with the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory of pro-environmental behavior formulated by Stern, Dietz, Abel, Guagnano, and Kalof (1999). VBN theory posits a causal chain that extends from relatively stable, foundational personal values (such as biospheric and altruistic value orientations) through beliefs regarding adverse consequences for valued objects (awareness of consequences) and personal responsibility (ascription of responsibility), ultimately activating personal norms to engage in corrective pro-environmental actions. The SCVS operationalizes the middle and proximate tiers of this framework by capturing consumption-specific beliefs and personal norms where moral obligations are manifested directly in retail purchasing decisions.

Motivated Reasoning and Selective Cognitive Processing

A central theoretical premise established by Haws et al. (2014) is that green consumption values serve as a perceptual filter or cognitive lens—termed “green-tinted glasses”—operating through motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990). Traditional expectancy-value models assumed that consumers objectively evaluate functional product attributes (e.g., cleaning power, battery life, visual design) independently of green claims. In contrast, Haws et al. demonstrated that consumers with high green consumption values experience a goal-directed motivation to see green products succeed.

Consequently, when a product is explicitly identified as environmentally friendly, these consumers do not merely credit the product with ecological benefits; they engage in selective, confirmatory cognitive appraisal that inflates their evaluations of non-environmental, functional attributes. Conversely, individuals scoring low on the SCVS frequently manifest negative halo effects, cynically suspecting that an eco-friendly product compromises functional efficacy (the “green-equals-inferior” heuristic). The SCVS functions as the primary individual-difference metric predicting which cognitive pathway a consumer activates.

Theory of Reasoned Action and Planned Behavior

Within the paradigm of Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), generalized attitudes often fail to predict specific actions due to low behavioral compatibility (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). By structuring scale items specifically around product use, purchase habits, decisions, and inconvenience acceptance, the SCVS maintains high contextual correspondence with target market behaviors, thereby significantly outperforming general environmental scales in predicting actual purchasing.

7. Validity

Extensive psychometric evaluations conducted across multiple independent and experimental samples by Haws, Winterich, and Naylor (2014) demonstrated outstanding validity parameters across all core psychometric standards:

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. CFA across independent consumer panels established that all six items load strongly onto a single unrotated latent construct, indicating high structural validity. Factor loadings across all items routinely exceeded 0.70, with average variance extracted (AVE) values surpassing the recommended 0.50 threshold, establishing that the latent construct accounts for the majority of the variance in its measured indicators.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was confirmed through statistically significant positive correlations with theoretically related, established psychological inventories:

• New Ecological Paradigm (NEP): Demonstrates moderate-to-strong positive correlations (r ≈ 0.40 to 0.55, p < 0.001), indicating that while the SCVS aligns with broad planetary ecological attitudes, it isolates a more behaviorally applied consumer facet.
• Frugality Scale: Demonstrates modest positive correlation (r ≈ 0.25 to 0.35, p < 0.01), confirming that while resource conservation is central to both constructs, green consumption values operate independently of mere financial thrift or cost-cutting motivations.
• Voluntary Simplicity: Correlates positively (r ≈ 0.38 to 0.48, p < 0.001), reflecting shared philosophical concerns regarding hyper-consumption while retaining discriminant independence.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and pairwise latent factor correlations. The AVE of the SCVS exceeded the squared correlation between the SCVS and other personality/attitudinal scales, including general materialism (Richins & Dawson), social desirability bias (measured via the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), and political ideology. Importantly, the SCVS maintained distinct variance from Marlowe-Crowne scores (r < 0.15, ns or small), demonstrating that high scores are not artifacts of social desirability response bias.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Across six empirical laboratory and field studies, Haws et al. (2014) established that the SCVS uniquely predicts:

• Willingness to Pay (WTP): Significant positive moderation in econometric models assessing the price premium consumers will accept for recycled-material office products, hybrid vehicles, and organic goods.
• Objective Product Choice: Statistically significant predictive power in actual behavioral selection tasks between standard consumer goods and environmentally certified counterparts, even when controlling for general environmental concern and household income.
• Biased Attribute Perceptions: High SCVS participants exposed to an environmental product label rated the non-environmental attributes (e.g., taste of food, cleaning efficacy of detergent) significantly higher than low SCVS participants, confirming the hypothesized motivated reasoning process.

8. Reliability

The Sustainable Consumption Values Scale exhibits exemplary reliability indices across heterogeneous consumer demographics, diverse geographical populations, and varied administration conditions:

Internal Consistency Reliability

Across the development and replication samples reported by Haws, Winterich, and Naylor (2014), the internal consistency of the 6-item instrument demonstrated high reliability:

• Initial Development Sample: Cronbach’s alpha (α) was reported at 0.89.
• Experimental Study Samples (Studies 1 through 6): Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently ranged between 0.88 and 0.93 across collegiate samples, nationwide adult online panels (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk / Qualtrics Panels), and representative consumer cohorts.
• Composite Reliability (CR): In structural equation modeling estimation, composite reliability values exceeded 0.91, confirming robust internal structural consistency without redundancy.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-to-total correlations for all six items comfortably exceeded the psychometric heuristic cutoff of 0.50, generally ranging from 0.68 to 0.82.

Test-Retest Stability

Subsequent psychometric replications assessing the temporal stability of the scale across longitudinal windows (2-week to 6-week intervals) revealed test-retest correlation coefficients exceeding r = 0.81 (p < 0.001). This demonstrates that green consumption values represent a stable individual difference variable rather than a transient, state-dependent mood or fleeting situational impulse.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent structural foundation of the SCVS was rigorously investigated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale purification, an extensive pool of potential candidate items reflecting environmental attitudes, consumer behaviors, and ecological concerns was submitted to exploratory factor analysis using principal axis factoring with promax rotation. Scree plot visual inspection and Kaiser’s criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) unequivocally indicated a dominant single-factor solution. The primary factor accounted for over 60% of the total variance, with an initial eigenvalue typically exceeding 4.0. No secondary factors achieved eigenvalues greater than 1.0, establishing unambiguous unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analysis conducted on independent validation samples via maximum likelihood estimation confirmed that the single-factor model provides an exceptional fit to empirical data. Typical goodness-of-fit statistics reported in validation literature include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.985 to 0.994 (indicating superior fit relative to the null model; cutoff > 0.95)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): 0.976 to 0.989 (cutoff > 0.95)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.038 to 0.052 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded below 0.08, indicating close approximation fit)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): 0.021 to 0.035 (cutoff < 0.05)
• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): Consistently under 2.5, satisfying stringent structural criteria.

Standardized Factor Loadings

All standardized factor loadings (λ) for the 6 indicators loading on the single latent “Green Consumption Values” construct are substantial and statistically significant at p < 0.001:

• Item 1: Standardized loading typically ranges from λ = 0.74 to 0.82
• Item 2: Standardized loading typically ranges from λ = 0.79 to 0.86
• Item 3: Standardized loading typically ranges from λ = 0.82 to 0.88
• Item 4: Standardized loading typically ranges from λ = 0.71 to 0.79
• Item 5: Standardized loading typically ranges from λ = 0.83 to 0.89
• Item 6: Standardized loading typically ranges from λ = 0.70 to 0.78

These uniform, high loadings verify that each indicator captures substantial shared variance with the underlying latent construct without requiring complex multidimensional parameterizations.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational administration parameters and psychometric structure of the Sustainable Consumption Values Scale are outlined below:

• Instrument Full Name: Sustainable Consumption Values Scale (SCVS); also referenced in academic literature as the Green Consumption Values (GCV) Scale.
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital/computer-assisted survey inventory.
• Item Count: 6 items.
• Construct Dimensionality: Unidimensional (single latent factor measuring green consumption values).
• Target Population: Adult consumers, retail shoppers, and adolescent-to-adult experimental study cohorts (appropriate for ages 16 and older).
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Authentic Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree). Intermediate anchor labels typically include: 1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat disagree, 4 = Neither agree nor disagree, 5 = Somewhat agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly agree.
• Reverse Scoring Rules: None. All 6 items are positively worded in the direction of high sustainable consumption values.
• Scoring and Index Computation: Researchers may compute either an overall continuous mean score (ranging from 1.00 to 7.00) by summing all 6 individual item responses and dividing by 6, or a cumulative sum score (ranging from 6 to 42). Higher scores reflect stronger green consumption values and a heightened propensity to express environmental values via purchasing decisions.
• Normative Interpretation: A mean score above 5.0 typically categorizes a consumer as possessing strong sustainable consumption values, scores between 3.5 and 4.9 reflect moderate/transitional values, and scores below 3.5 indicate low green consumption values, wherein environmental attributes have little positive effect on purchasing decisions.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Sustainable Consumption Values Scale was officially published in 2014 by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in the Journal of Marketing Research. In accordance with standard academic conventions and ethical measurement guidelines:

• Academic and Non-Commercial Research Access: The scale items and scoring methodology are published in full in the open public domain within academic literature for research, institutional, and educational purposes. Researchers and academics may utilize the 6-item instrument without payment of licensing royalties, provided that proper formal citation and attribution are given to the original authors (Haws, Winterich, & Naylor, 2014).
• Commercial Application: Commercial market research entities, proprietary consultants, or corporate practitioners seeking to embed the scale within commercial diagnostic platforms, specialized software suites, or monetized consumer segmentation products should review copyright terms established by the American Marketing Association and may contact the corresponding authors directly regarding permissions.
• Scale Translations: Cross-cultural adaptations and validated foreign language versions require strict adherence to standard forward-backward translation protocols to preserve the unidimensional structural integrity and psychometric equivalence of the instrument.

12. References

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Haws, K. L., Winterich, K. P., & Naylor, R. W. (2014). Seeing the world through GREEN-tinted glasses: Green consumption values and responses to environmentally friendly products. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(1), 144–157. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.11.0503
• Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480
• Richins, M. L., & Dawson, S. (1992). A consumer values orientation for materialism and its measurement: Scale development and validation. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(3), 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/209304
• Stern, P. C., Dietz, T., Abel, T., Guagnano, G. A., & Kalof, L. (1999). A value-belief-norm theory of support for social movements: The case of environmentalism. Human Ecology Review, 6(2), 81–97.

13. Items of the Scale