Environmental Vulnerability Perception

What it measures

Five items measuring the degree to which a person feels unprotected, susceptible, unprepared, and vulnerable to threats and negative events in their environment. Rahinel and Nelson (2016) labelled the construct 'preparedness for unsafe environment' and used it in Study 4 to capture how a manipulated sense of environmental threat shaped product preferences, particularly for safety-oriented products. The items are framed around a generalised sense of vulnerability to the world rather than a specific threat.

Response format

7-point unipolar (1=not at all, 7=very much)

Scale items

• I feel unprotected from the world around me.
• I feel susceptible to threats in the world around me.
• I feel unprepared for bad things in the world around me that could happen to me.
• I feel vulnerable to negative changes in the world around me.
• I feel like I would incur the harshest possible consequences if something happened in the world around me.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Alpha was .91. Validity was not formally assessed. The scale captures a general felt sense of environmental vulnerability rather than specific-domain risk perception, making it conceptually distinct from health-risk or financial-risk scales. Its brevity and flexible framing make it useful as a manipulation check for threat-priming studies.

Citation

Rahinel, R., & Nelson, N.M. (2016). When brand logos describe the environment: Design instability and the utility of safety-oriented products. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(3), 478–496.

Keywords