Man-Nature Attitudes of Arizona Water Resource Leaders

Abstract

A pilot study is developed to construct a scale which measures attitude towards human management in Arizona. The decision-maker's attitudes toward his man-made and natural environments are investigated in terms of cultural (interior), natural (intermediate), and balanced (exterior) reference positions. A decision-making model consists of stimuli (inputs), decision-making (process function), and response (outputs). The 12 questions developed and applied to Arizona water managers were reduced to 8 capable scalogram analysis. These scaled questions related to favoring physical or emotional needs of man, deciding who gets what or increasing the supply, including behavioral patterns, protecting environmental areas, manipulation of resources as harmful or beneficial, municipal and industrial demands, opinions of groups, and possible overuse of resources. The scale met 5 criteria, which are defined by reproducibility, non-scale pattern of response, number of questions, error ratio and cross checking of responses. This study may provide managers with means of objectively evaluating and improving decisions.