Environmental Education, Attitudes, and Behaviours of Nutrition and Dietetics Students on Buying Organic Foods

Abstract

Environmental knowledge is a main determinant of organic food buying. This study investigated the relationships among nutrition and dietetics students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours toward organic foods as they are marketed as healthier and environment friendly. The participants included all fourth-year nutrition and dietetics undergraduate students at 3 faculties in Konya, Turkey. The Cronbach’s alpha and factor loadings were calculated for the constructed indexes to check the reliability. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test was conducted and the sample size was found to be sufficient. Bartlett’s sphericity test was used to measure the suitability of the chi-square value for factor analysis. The factor analysis was performed on the obtained data of the questionnaire items using the Varimax method. The higher the ratio, the more suitable the data set is for factor analysis. The ANOVA Tukey’s test of additivity was used to calculate the total score of the scale. It was found that students with a higher score on environment knowledge showed a more positive environmental attitude. Specifically, nutrition and dietetics students with more positive environmental attitudes showed positive environmental behaviours. Moreover, environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours were significantly associated with increased frequency of purchasing organic food among students. This is the first research study to investigate the environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours of nutrition and dietetics students, which are believed to be associated with their frequency of purchasing organic foods.