Measurement of Wildlife Value Orientations Among Diverse Audiences: A Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis Among Hispanic and Non-Hispanic White Communities (303629)

Keywords: ethnicity, Hispanic, Latino, measurement, MGCFA, wildlife, wildlife value orientations

Wildlife value orientations (WVOs) are increasingly being used to describe broad societal shifts that are altering the way people perceive wildlife. Concurrent with these shifts, is a diversification of cultural heritages that complicate comparisons of WVOs across cultures. Yet, when measuring WVOs across cultures, differences of WVOs may be genuine variations between the populations, or may be artifacts of the measurement instrument. Therefore, there is a need to determine if various cultures interact with the instrument uniformly. Three multiple group confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA) examined how ethnicity, acculturation, and language spoken are related to the scale’s performance within Hispanic communities. Results of each MGCFA support the cross-cultural stability of the WVO factor structure. Additional cross-cultural research of WVOs is needed to expand the WVO construct and to assist natural resource practitioners in understanding diverse constituencies, but conducting a MGCFA analysis should be a necessary precondition when comparing WVOs across cultures.