44  Food for thought: Validity

🏠 Self-study

I recently came across an article with the headline Britain one of least ‘nature-connected’ nations in world – with Nepal the most. After reading it, I thought it was a good opportunity to think in a bit more depth about validity, specifically content validity.

Here are some quotes from the article:

Nature connectedness is a psychological concept that measures the closeness of an individual’s relationship with other species. Researchers found the strongest indicator for a close relationship with nature was high levels of “spirituality” in a society. More religious societies and cultures where there was a preference for faith over science showed high levels of nature connection.

The correlation between nature connection and “spirituality” in countries was discovered using measurements of the importance of religion, beliefs in a god and faith in different countries recorded by the World Values Survey.

“Nature connectedness is not just about what we do, but how we feel, think, and value our place in the living world,” said Richardson, who admitted he was not surprised that Britain languished so low in the nature connection league table. “We’ve become a more rational, economic and scientific society,” [Richardson] said. “How do we reintegrate natural thinking in our very technological world? How do you create sacred urban nature?”

As someone who cares about the environment, but who is not a particularly spiritual or religious person, I was curious about the correlation between nature connectedness and spirituality. So, how was “nature connectedness” operationalised in this study (Richardson et al., 2025)? It was defined as the latent mean1 on a shortened version of the connectedness to nature scale (Mayer & Frantz, 2004). The following items were rated from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree):

  1. I feel as though I belong to the Earth as equally as it belongs to me.

  2. I think of the natural world as a community to which I belong.

  3. I often feel part of the web of life.

  4. Like a tree can be part of a forest, I feel embedded within the broader natural world.

  5. I feel that all inhabitants of Earth, human, and nonhuman, share a common ‘life force’.

  6. When I think of my life, I imagine myself to be part of a larger cyclical process of living.

  7. I often feel a kinship with animals and plants.

Looking at these items, it seems to me that to strongly agree with most of these items, one needs to hold beliefs that are aligned with animistic, vitalistic, romantic, Buddhist and/or pantheistic ideas. Considering this, a correlation with spirituality is perhaps not particularly surprising.

What does that mean in terms of validity? One could argue that this is simply what nature connectedness is—a fundamentally spiritual belief. From this perspective, the scale has strong content validity because the items accurately reflect the construct as defined.

While this view is internally consistent, I believe it’s potentially problematic. The article frames low nature connectedness as a negative trait, implying that societies should move towards a more “spiritual” worldview.

I’m not sure that’s desirable or necessary. Surely, it must be possible to recognise our connectedness to nature in a more rational and scientific way. It must be possible to hold a non-spiritual worldview and still recognise our profound dependence on the environment.

I asked Gemini to generate some items that might represent a more scientifically based nature connectedness. Here is what it came up with:

  1. I recognise that the human species is fundamentally dependent on the health and stability of global ecosystems.

  2. I conceptualise the human species as one component within a complex, interdependent ecosystem.

  3. I think that the ongoing degradation of the natural environment poses a significant threat to the long-term security and well-being of the human species.

  4. I recognise that all known organisms are connected through shared, fundamental biochemical and evolutionary principles.

If we accept the premise that there could be spiritual and non-spiritual bases for nature connectedness, the connectedness to nature scale in its current form appears to suffer from construct underrepresentation. Content validity requires that the items be a representative sample of the entire content domain of the construct. If there are other, equally valid ways to be “connected to nature” that are not represented by these items, then the scale’s content validity is compromised. This highlights the importance of critically examining not just the results of a study, but also the methods and tools used to generate them.

References

Mayer, F. S., & Frantz, C. M. (2004). The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(4), 503–515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.10.001
Richardson, M., Lengieza, M., White, M. P., Tran, U. S., Voracek, M., Stieger, S., & Swami, V. (2025). Macro-level determinants of nature connectedness: An exploratory analysis of 61 countries. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-025-02275-w

  1. Instead of just averaging raw survey answers (which can be skewed by things like translation issues or random error), a latent mean estimates the group’s “true” underlying score by correcting for imperfections in the questions. This makes comparisons between different cultural groups more accurate.↩︎