Data on environmental attitudes and behaviours

Presenter(s): Mark Elliot, Pierre Walthéry and Richard Kingston

This resource is focused on the use of secondary data (analysis) for the study of environmental attitudes and behaviours in the UK context. The resources cover the various data sources that can be accessed and used, including the types of quantitative analysis that can be conducted using these data. The three videos will cover an overview of datasets that are available to researchers, research on assessing the structure of UK environmental concern and its association with pro-environmental behaviour, and a presentation on the Digital Solutions Programme. 

Also included are links to datasets containing data about environmental attitudes and behaviours in the UK.

Datasets on environmental attitudes and behaviour from the UK Data Service

Pierre Walthéry from the UK Data Service presents a sample of studies from the UKDS catalogue with attitudinal and behavioural data relevant for sustainability related research.

Assessing the structure of UK environmental concern and its association with pro-environmental behaviour

Mark Elliot from the University of Manchester presents research which extracted latent variables of environmental concern from social survey data. He discusses whether class or factor analysis is a more appropriate technique for these construct.

The NERC Digital Solutions Programme: making 40 petabytes of environmental data available to users across the UK

In this video, Richard Kingston explains how the programme is combining this data with a range of social, economic, health and other environmental data using FAIR principles. Most of the data is spatial which lends itself to being delivered within a geospatial framework. Watch the video to find out how the Digital Solutions Hub is planning to evolve into a UK wide decision-support system to support users beyond academia in the public, private and third sectors. Users will be able to integrate their own data and models in the Hub.

Supporting materials

About the author

Mark Elliot is a Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. Professor Elliot has been central to the field of confidentiality and privacy since 1996. Professor Elliot collaborates widely with non-academic partners, particularly with national statistical agencies where he has been a key influence on disclosure control methodology used in censuses and surveys and where the SUDA software that he developed in collaboration with colleagues in Computer Science at Manchester is used.

Primary author profile page

• Published on: 13 December 2023
• Event hosted by: Manchester
• Keywords: secondary data | environmental attitudes | behaviours |
• To cite this resource:

  Mark Elliot, Pierre Walthéry and Richard Kingston. (2023). Data on environmental attitudes and behaviours. National Centre for Research Methods online learning resource. Available at https://www.ncrm.ac.uk/resources/online/all/?id=20834 [accessed: 29 April 2024]