A Novel Approach to Deepen Understanding of Undergraduates' Environmental Backgrounds

Abstract

Universities often lack a detailed understanding of the environmental backgrounds of their students. One way to improve understanding is through segmentation, which breaks down a population into groups of people with similar characteristics. This study aims to use segmentation to determine groups within the student population, based on environmental attitudes, and compare these groups in terms of environmental knowledge, activities, information sources and demographic characteristics. This study of undergraduate students identified six groups, with varying levels of support for the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP). Factor scores varied among groups with similar NEP scores. Student groups with high NEP scores used more information sources, participated in more environment-friendly activities and were more likely to be female than those with low scores. Environmental knowledge using four indicators was not significantly correlated to attitude groups. The most used information sources were from various electronic and print media.