University students’ environmental world views based on the new environmental paradigm (NEP) scale: a case study from Kosovo

In this paper, we would like to highlight an important phenomenon in developing countries through a case study in Kosovo. Today, Kosovo is still considered a developing country and faces a multitude of environmental and natural resource management problems after the 1999 war. While having the youngest population in Europe, it is of great importance to adopt an environmentally responsible lifestyle. The attitude of 444 undergraduate students regarding the environment was obtained by means of the well-known method “New Environmental Paradigm Scale” proposed by Dunlap and Van Liere (NEP). The results of this investigation revealed a low students’ knowledge about the environment and the environmental issues. The internal reliability values are very low, and there is a significant variation among the values for the five dimensions. The two-dimensional structure proved to be more reliable, but as in many developing countries, dominant social paradigm was the main problem with the low score of total NEP. According to the method used, the lowest score was found for items related to natural resources, which may indicate that these students as consumers may not prefer to be accountable for energy expenses. Therefore, complying with various studies, we suggest improving students’ knowledge through environmental education and using instruments that are more reliable to measure environmental attitudes.