IB ESS SL1.1 PerspectivesPaper 1 & 2Core skill~12 min read
How Values Shape Environmental Views
Values are the layer underneath a perspective. They are quieter and harder to see, which is exactly why ESS bothers to measure them — through value surveys, and through graphs that track what people actually do over years rather than what they say once.
📚 What you need to know
Values are qualities or principles a person believes have worth. They guide behaviour, attitudes and decisions.
Values shape priorities, judgements, perspectives and choices. They are personal, but cultural and social factors shape them too.
Values are shared and reshaped within communities, and are visible in the actions of organisations.
Clashing values create tensions between people and between organisations.
Value surveys investigate how social groups view and prioritise environmental issues.
A good survey takes different viewpoints into account and captures the full range of opinion in a group.
Closed-ended questions give quantitative data that can be analysed statistically; open-ended questions give richer detail but are harder to analyse.
Repeating surveys over time produces behaviour-time graphs, showing how behaviours and lifestyles change.
What values are
Values are the principles a person treats as worth something: honesty, fairness, loyalty, compassion, independence. They are not opinions about a particular issue — they are the standards used to judge every issue.
That makes them powerful. Values quietly decide what you notice, what you tolerate, and what you would be prepared to give up.
The dashed arrow is the part people forget. Habits change values as well as the other way round, which is why sustained campaigns work better than one-off appeals.
Where values come from, and where they show
Level
How values appear
Example
The individual
They shape priorities, judgements and everyday choices
Choosing to walk rather than drive because you value low-impact living
Culture
Whole societies hold values in common, learned rather than chosen
In many cultures, deference to elders shapes how decisions get made at all
The community
Values are shared and reshaped through how people talk and act together
A neighbourhood that values its river organises clean-ups and backs green policies
Organisations
Visible in advertising, social media, published policies and actual decisions
A clothing company donating a share of profits to conservation is signalling stewardship
Movements
Values scale up into collective demands for change
Youth climate strikes turned a shared value into sustained pressure on policymakers
Be a little sceptical about stated organisational values. What a company says in an advertisement and what it does in its supply chain can be very different, and an evaluation question is often really asking you to spot that gap.
When values clash
Different values create tension, between individuals and between organisations. The conflict is rarely about facts. It is about which principle should win when two good things cannot both be had.
Freedom of expression against respect for other cultures.
A community’s right to develop economically against the protection of a habitat.
Individual convenience against collective long-term benefit.
In multicultural societies these tensions are constant, and managing them takes understanding of and respect for different values — not a ruling on who is correct. That framing matters in your answers.
Value surveys
A value survey investigates how a social group sees a set of environmental issues, and which of them the group treats as important. It is the standard tool for turning something invisible into data.
🧩 Designing one that works
Decide what you actually want to know — attitudes to renewable energy, to waste, to public transport. A vague survey produces vague data.
Build in different viewpoints. Questions written from one standpoint will only find people who share it.
Aim to capture the whole range of opinion in the group, including the views you did not expect.
Choose your question types deliberately — closed for numbers, open for reasons.
Sample properly. A group is not uniform, and a survey of your friends is a survey of your friends.
Repeat it later if you want to see change rather than a snapshot.
Multiple-choice items, rating scales and agree-to-disagree scales are all closed. Each answer becomes a number, and numbers can be tested for trends and correlations.
Method
Strength
Limitation
Online survey tools
Reach a wider audience, gather more data, do it faster, and analyse it efficiently
Only reaches people who are online and willing to respond, which biases the sample
Closed-ended questions
Produce structured data that can be quantified and analysed statistically to reveal trends, correlations and patterns
Respondents can only pick from options you thought of
Open-ended questions
Capture detail and reasoning you would never have predicted
Time-consuming and difficult to analyse consistently
Interviews
Allow follow-up questions and clarification
Slow, and the interviewer can influence the answer
🧠
Pairing survey data with real data
Attitudes on their own prove very little. The strong move is to correlate them with a measured behaviour — survey attitudes to recycling, then compare with the actual mass of material recycled. Agreement between the two is a real finding; a gap between them is a more interesting one.
Behaviour-time graphs
Run the same survey again next year, and the year after, and you can plot how a behaviour or lifestyle is changing. That is a behaviour-time graph, and it turns a set of snapshots into a trend.
The line was already drifting upwards before the campaign. That matters: some of the later rise would have happened anyway, and a good evaluation says so.
What behaviour-time graphs can track
What they are used for
Energy consumption in the home
Monitoring progress towards a sustainability target
Waste generated and recycling rates
Evaluating whether an environmental initiative actually worked
Transport choices — driving, cycling, public transport
Visualising the impact of a specific intervention
Water use and composting habits
Identifying where further improvement is possible
WE 1
Writing survey questions
A student wants to investigate attitudes to single-use plastic in their school. Write one closed and one open question, and justify each choice. (4 marks)
Closed question
“On a scale of 1 to 5, how important is reducing single-use plastic to you personally?”
justification: every answer becomes a number, so the results can be totalled, averaged and tested for trends across year groupsOpen question
“What would make it easier for you to use less single-use plastic at school?”
justification: it captures reasons the student would never have listed as options, such as a lack of water fountainsOne question for the numbers, one for the reasons behind themthe closed question measures the value; the open one explains the gap between the value and the behaviour
WE 2
Interpreting a behaviour-time graph
Using the graph above, describe the trend and evaluate the claim that the campaign caused the change. (5 marks)
Describe: before the campaign
Cycling rose slowly from 12 % in 2019 to 18 % in 2022, an increase of six percentage points over three years.
Describe: after the campaign
From 2022 the line steepens sharply, reaching 38 % by 2025 — twenty percentage points in three years.
Evaluate: the case for the campaign
The change in gradient coincides with the campaign, and the size of the increase is much larger than the earlier drift.
Evaluate: the case against
Cycling was already rising before 2022, so part of the later increase may be continuation of an existing trend. Other factors could also be responsible — new cycle lanes, fuel prices, or a change in school policy.
A strong association, but correlation on its own does not prove the campaign caused it“the trend began before the intervention” is the single most useful sentence in graph evaluation questions
WE 3
Limitations of a value survey
A survey of one class finds 90 % agree that protecting biodiversity is important. Outline two limitations of using this to describe the whole school. (3 marks)
Limitation 1: the sample
One class is not representative of the school. Students of a similar age, and possibly studying similar subjects, may share attitudes that other year groups do not.
Limitation 2: what agreement measures
Agreeing that something is important is cheap. The survey measures a stated value, not behaviour, and the two often diverge.
How to improve it
Sample randomly across year groups, and pair the attitude question with a measured behaviour.
Unrepresentative sample, and stated values are not actionsremember that a group is never uniform — even one class contains a range of views
💡 Exam tips
Keep values and perspectives distinct: values are general principles, perspectives are views on a specific issue.
When describing a graph, quote figures from both axes and give the units.
Always check whether a trend started before the intervention being credited with it.
Say what a survey’s sample was, and what that limits your conclusion to.
Use “closed-ended” and “open-ended” by name, with a reason for each.
Remember that a social group contains diverse views. Do not write as if everyone in it agrees.
⚠ Common mistakes
Treating stated attitudes as behaviour. People say one thing and do another, constantly.
Claiming a campaign caused a change without checking what the line was doing beforehand.
Writing leading questions such as “Don’t you agree plastic is harmful?”, which only find the answer you wanted.
Surveying a convenient group and generalising to a whole population.
Using only open questions, then having no way to analyse the results.
Assuming organisational values are genuine because they appear in the advertising.
Up next: Worldviews and the Environment — the widest lens of all, and the environmental value systems that sort those lenses into ecocentric, anthropocentric and technocentric.
Want this explained one-to-one?
Book a free session with an experienced IB ESS tutor and get your trickiest topics made simple.
