Life stories show relationships between environmental identity and generativity among environmental activitists and nonactivistsResearch has found people’s generativity (care for future generations), environmental concerns, and environmental identity to be positively associated and potentially mutually influential. The purpose of this study was to gather life stories from both environmental activists and non-activists to examine the relationship between environmental identity, environmental behavior, and generativity.
The study was conducted in Canada, with participants recruited from Ontario and British Columbia. Environmental activists were identified and recruited through media, publications, and exemplar status in environmental organizations. Non-activists were recruited through advertisements at universities, community newspapers, community centers, and websites. The final 110 person study population was comprised of 54 environmental activists and 56 non-activists, who ranged in age from 17 to 59 years old and were 63% female. The research sessions lasted approximately two hours and included an audio-recorded narrative life interview and the completion of a set of questionnaires. During the interview, participants were asked to talk about their personal experiences with the environment, with prompts for five particular stories, such as telling about an event that got them to think about the environment, a time when they had moral courage in relationship to the environment, and an environmental turning point.
Analysis of the study data found support for the study’s first hypothesis that there would be “differences in the personal environmental stories told by environmental activists and non-activists, with stories of activists reflecting greater reflective engagement and expertise in this domain than those of their counterparts.” The findings also support a second hypothesis, suggesting that environmental activism is substantially related to a richer environmental identity, as illustrated by environmental life stories that had greater vividness, meaning making, and impact on the individual’s life course and as quantified by a standard measure of environmental identity used in the questionnaire. For both the activists and non-activists who had a high environmental identity, their feelings of connection with the natural world were pronounced during their story telling. A third hypothesis that generativity would be “positively related to these features of the environmental narratives as well as to…environmental identity across the sample of activists and non-activists” was also supported by the evidence.
The researchers note that these findings suggest the construct that “the development of a situated personal identity, involving strong feelings of connection with nature, could lead to a strengthening of feelings of generativity about the natural world and thus of generative concern overall, given the strong focus on future concerns for the earth within the environmental movement.”
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