Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 48, June 2013, Pages 126-138
Journal of Cleaner Production

Greening due to environmental education? Environmental knowledge, attitudes, consumer behavior and everyday pro-environmental activities of Hungarian high school and university students

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.11.030Get rights and content

Abstract

Environmental education is assumed to have a significant influence on the environmental awareness, everyday lifestyles and consumer behavior of students. Several higher education institutions have recently recognized the importance of integrating sustainability issues into education to make this impact focused and explicit. This paper explores the relationship strength between environmental education and environmental knowledge, attitudes and reported actual behavior of university and high school students, providing a comparative questionnaire survey analysis which is unique in the literature. The results show a strong correlation between the intensity of environmental education and the environmental knowledge of students. This is partly due to the environmental education itself and partly due to the higher intrinsic motivation of committed students who voluntarily participate in environmental education, primarily at university level. The focus of the environmental education appears to be important in shaping attitudes about sustainable consumption. Addressing the issue of consumerism in environmental education clearly increases awareness of the need for consumption-related lifestyle changes. Based on Multidimensional Scaling methodology, the interdependence of several influencing variables is explored and illustrated graphically. Respondents are classified into five clusters – hedonist, techno-optimist, active environmentalist, familiar and careless – according to their environmental knowledge, attitudes, consumer behavior and everyday environmental awareness. Consistencies and inconsistencies in behavior are then identified in order to promote the creation of more effective educational instruments for supporting sustainable consumption and lifestyles.

Introduction

Today's students will have a major influence on the future state of the environment which makes the incorporation and institutionalization of sustainability issues into education highly relevant (see Lozano, 2006; Wright, 2007; Waas et al., 2010; Zilahy and Huisingh, 2009). The challenge for universities is high: the integration of different perspectives and the concept of sustainability makes systemic and holistic thinking and radically innovative ways of education necessary (Svanström et al., 2008; Lozano, 2006). The importance of understanding the attitudes and behavior of students towards the environment and of finding effective ways to influence this behavior through education is thus beyond dispute. In Hungary, little research has so far dealt specifically with the environmental consciousness and consumption habits of students. To address this knowledge gap, two surveys were conducted to capture information about:

  • (1)

    what today's Hungarian students, of differing ages, influenced by the different characteristics of environmental education, think and know about environmental issues (see Asunta, 2004; Kagawa, 2007; Michalos et al., 2009);

  • (2)

    how students view the relationship between the state of the environment and consumer lifestyles (see Benn, 2004; Worsley and Skrzypiec, 1998);

  • (3)

    how students actually behave and what determines their willingness to act in a pro-environmental way (see Boyes et al., 2008 and Kagawa, 2007).

The two surveys were executed in Autumn 2009 and Spring 2010 and were designed to elicit and allow comparison of the opinions of university and high school students (here the term ‘university students’ covers both university and college students of 18–24 years of age, while ‘high school students’ refers to 14–18 year old students from various types of high schools1).

The main assumption behind the research was that the intensity of involvement in environmental education is a significant factor in the formation of students' opinions and behavior regarding environmental issues (see Álvarez Suárez and Vega Marcote, 2010; Wright, 2007, Svanström et al., 2008; Lukman et al., 2013; Lozano, 2006 as well as Zilahy and Huisingh, 2009). Hence, the interrelationships between environmental education and environmental knowledge, attitudes and behavior were examined in the paper.

Section snippets

Determinants of students' environmental awareness

Generally, the most important dimensions of an individual’s environmental awareness appear to be environmental knowledge, values, attitudes, willingness to act and actual behaviors (Ajzen, 1985; Nemcsicsné Zsóka, 2008; Luthans, 2006) which are influenced by several factors including intentional and situational elements. Based on a profound value system, knowledge and attitudes are crucial because of their potential impact on behavior (although Csutora (2012) states that even positive,

Research objective and assumptions

The objective of the research was to uncover how strong is the relationship between environmental education and the knowledge, attitudes and actual behaviors of high school and university students in Hungary. The ultimate goal of the research was to formulate recommendations for environmental education in Hungary in order to effectively foster more sustainable student behaviors at both high school and university level. The research is exploratory in nature, although based on some preliminary

Impact of environmental education on students

Hearing about environmental issues at school or in everyday life is likely to have an important effect on students' thinking and attitudes. In Hungarian high schools, there is no option to specialize in environmental issues but subjects like geography, biology, chemistry and physics include environmental topics. Hence, high school students are liable to be more exposed to environmental topics than university students. Only 11% of high school students reported to not taking one single

Mapping the relationship between variables using MDS analysis

The analysis of the relationships between 14 variables from our questionnaire highlights the nature of Hungarian students' environmental knowledge, values and actual behavior in an explicit way. To visualize the data easily and to standardize different scales of measurement all variables were transformed into binary variables (thus gaining 58 binary variables as an input for our analysis). Table 1 presents the details, with an explanation of the content of variables in addition to the

Discussion

Our research was designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the relationship between environmental education and elements of the pro-environmental behavior (knowledge, attitudes and reported actual behavior) of students. The comparative analysis of students at different levels of education and specialization is unique in the literature, as surveys usually focus on either level. In spite of its complicated nature, we deliberately chose to undertake a comparative analysis to highlight the

Conclusions

The causalities between environmental education and pro-environmental behaviors are difficult to measure in a reliable way. The range of aspects which influences the behavior of high school and university students is very wide and the interrelationship of those aspects is rather complex. It is difficult therefore to separate the effects of environmental education from the many other factors (e.g. the role of age in personal responsibility, the impacts of various information sources, habits and

Acknowledgments

The research was financially supported by the EEA and the Norwegian Financial Mechanism in the framework of a project called “Sustainable Consumption, Production and Communication”. Furthermore, we would like to thank our colleague, Dr. András Bezegh for designing the online questionnaire for the university sample. Publishing is supported by the TÁMOP 4.2.2/B-10/1-2010-0023 project.

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