Abstract
PurposeThis study aims to investigate the moderating effect of sustainability app on environmental citizenship behavior on the basis of norm-activation model.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire survey, which comprises five variables (i.e. awareness of consequences, ascription of responsibility, personal norms, environmental citizenship behavior in a private sphere and environmental citizenship behavior in a public sphere) measured through 16 items, was conducted in the USA by using Amazon Mechanical Turk. With 549 valid respondents’ answers in hand, the collected data were analyzed applying a multi-group structural equation modelling technique with IBM SPSS AMOS 23 software program.FindingsThe results revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between awareness of consequences, ascription of responsibility, personal norms and environmental citizenship behavior in both private and public sphere. Furthermore, this study attested that sustainability apps utilization has a moderating effect on the predictors of environmental citizenship behaviors.Originality/valuePast studies have seldom examined the contribution of mobile apps to environmental sustainability. This paper enriches the extant academic literature in the field of technology for behavior change, and bears significant implications on how sustainability apps can be adopted by governments, policymakers, organizations and teacher educators to engage people and stimulate environmental citizenship behaviors.
Highlights
Sustainability, defined as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”© Mario D’Arco and Vittoria Marino
We evaluated the moderating effect of a specific contextual variable, namely, sustainability app usage, on the relationships between the constructs that characterize the norm-activation model
To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first study investigating the role of sustainability apps in the relationship between environmental citizenship behavior and some of its predictors, namely, personal norms, ascription of responsibility and awareness of consequences
Summary
Sustainability, defined as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”© Mario D’Arco and Vittoria Marino. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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