Suchergebnisse

Purpose
– The purpose of this study was twofold: first, to optimize the Environmental Attitudes Inventory (EAI) and second, to establish a baseline of the difference in environmental attitudes between first and final year students, taken at the start of a university's declaration of commitment to EfS.


Design/methodology/approach
– The psychometrically designed EAI was used to overcome the problems and limitations of the much-used, but controversial, revised New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale. The performance of the original 72-item EAI was compared with our 37-item reduced form using a population of first- and final-year university students.


Findings
– The reduced 37-item EAI provides a reliable and valid tool for investigating structured, multi-dimensional environmental attitudes of university students while reducing response burden and increasing response and completion rates compared with the longer versions of the EAI.


Research limitations/implications
– No attempt is made to link elements of the university experience with changes in attitude between first- and third-year students. The authors expect the 12-faceted EAI to provide more detailed feedback on the affective outcomes of EfS initiatives than currently used instruments.


Originality/value
– This research contributes to establishing the EAI as a gold standard with which to monitor students' environmental attitudes. Although most studies aimed at understanding the impact of EfS measure attitude change over relatively short periods of time – typically using the brief NEP scale administered immediately before and after a specific semester course – the approach developed here is designed to detect attitudinal change that may be ascribed to the entire university experience between students' first and final year.

Abstract. The aims of this study were to assess adolescents' perceptions of the personal risks and prevalence of smoking, and to examine whether these perceptions were related and how they varied by gender, age and smoking status. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 3657 11-16 year olds from a sample of 138 secondary schools in England. The results showed a large false consensus effect: smokers gave higher estimates of the prevalence of smoking among their peers than non-smokers. The gap between smokers and non-smokers decreased between 11 and 16 but was still apparent among 15 and 16 year olds. Smokers of different ages showed little difference in their estimates of prevalence. Smokers were substantially less optimistic in their risk perceptions than non-smokers. Even the youngest smokers acknowledged that their risks were higher than non-smokers'. Smokers nevertheless showed unrealistic optimism. There was little evidence for the idea that the false consensus effect may contribute to unrealistic optimism. The findings raise the question of whether giving children accurate information about smoking prevalence would reduce their likelihood of taking up smoking. The demonstration of optimism bias in teenage smokers highlights the need for innovative education campaigns focused on the health risks of smoking.

Place attachment provides insight on why and to what extent individuals value a particular setting. Most investigations involving place attachment and environmental attitudes have been conducted in terrestrial settings; little work has addressed proenvironmental behavior in marine settings. The purpose of the current investigation was to extend Stern et al.'s work, which indicates that individuals' environmental worldviews (EWVs) influence their attitudes toward anthropogenic impacts on the environment. We hypothesized a model wherein place attachment partially mediates the relationship between recreational visitors' EWV and their awareness of consequences of negative impacts on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. We then compared this model with competing models. Our results suggest that place attachment is a useful addition to studies that use Stern et al.'s value-belief-norm model.