Awareness and Responsiveness to Environmental Issues by Youths: A Logistic Regression Approach

Abstract

This research was carried out among student in Nigerian schools. The logistic regression model and ordinal logistic model were fitted with Awareness to environmental issues (AEI) with two levels and Responsiveness to environmental issues (REI) with five levels as the response variable. The predictor variables are age, geographical zones, type of school and location of school. The fitted logistic regression was shown to be a good fit and the result revealed that the older the students the more responsive they are to environmental issues. The overall effect of zone and type of school were statistically significant though the type of school had a negative effect. The ordinal logistic regression was equally fitted and the results also show that the older the student the more aware they are of environmental issues. The result also shows that the zones, urban schools and students in senior secondary and university are associated with higher likelihood of being aware of environmental issues and these effects are significant. The summary of the results reveals that though there is awareness of environmental issues in Nigeria but responsiveness towards is very low among students. Hence, we recommend that courses on environmental issues and responsiveness towards them should be incorporated in the academic curriculum of students especially in the universities since age has a positive effect on both RIE and AEI.