INVESTIGATING ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION AND STRUCTURING THE ROLE OF INTEREST

Abstract

Prior studies have explored a complex system where many factors correlate to environmental attitude and concern. The present study investigates how religious and environmental education background correlates to environmental interest and attitude. A total of 65 students from a midwestern religious college responded to a survey. The study focuses on structuring the role of interest, and a new theory is proposed partially based on the Theory of Planned Behavior. The Theory of Reverse Interest suggests the system of how voluntary or involuntary behaviors influence the interest towards a particular topic which then predicts the attitude and concern. In the study, the church attendance and the number of environmentally-themed courses was defined to be the voluntary or involuntary behaviors. The analysis indicates that there is a significant negative correlation between students’ church attendance and interest in environmental topics, whereas the opposite trend is found for the number of environmental education taken. Students’ interest in environmental topics was shown to be an excellent predictor for the environmental attitude. The full reverse interest model was briefly introduced at the end as a tool to explore what roles of interest (comparable to intention in the Theory of Planned Behavior) in explaining and predicting human attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavior control.