How materialism affects environmental attitudes and behaviours of secondary school students

Abstract

This study explored the associations among environmental knowledge, attitudes, materialistic values and pro-environmental behaviours along with other moderators and developed a path model to present their correlations. 200 secondary school students participated in the research using self-reported online questionnaire between late March and early April, 2020. Through identification of important predictors of students’ environmental behaviours, environmental education recommendations can be made to strengthen the effectiveness of the current environmental education (EE) initiatives. The results suggest that system knowledge alone does not have any association with students’ environmental values. On the other hand, materialistic value correlates negatively (- 0.247) towards environmental attitude while environmental attitude (0.15), subjective norms and perceived behavioural controls (0.325) and family income (-0.174) correlate with pro-environmental behaviour. Among all variables, subjective norms and perceived behavioural controls are the strongest predictors for environmental behaviour. Thus, this study recommends EE programmes to be carried out in a more inclusive setting in order for the two variables to play a more significant role to promote students’ proenvironmental behaviour.