Themes in the Human Experience of Nature

To identify themes in the human experience of nature, a three-part study was run. In the first part, 100 undergraduate students were asked to list three situations in which they are or were aware of nature and to describe one of these in detail. In the second part, 26 descriptions were selected from these responses, summarized to a 2- to 5-sentence format, and presented to a different group of 30 subjects who sorted them into groups on the basis of cross-item similarity. These groupings were then analyzed by hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling procedures to produce thematic meanings. In the third part, a qualitative analysis of themes was performed over the unabridged initial versions of the same set of descriptions. Results of both qualitative and quantitative procedures led to the identification of four themes—Power and Scale, Danger and Safety, Beauty, and Connection and Alienation—and to a smaller number of themes unique to each mode of analysis. All themes were related to the everyday meanings of nature and to the more abstract definitions of nature employed in scientific or aesthetic analyses of the human response to this domain.