University Students' Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behaviors Related to Marine Environment Pollution.

Abstract

Recent research on marine environment pollution (MEP) has primarily focused on legislative and market-based instruments rather than on understanding related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Within this context, we used a survey of university students in China to investigate attitudes and behaviors related to MEP. Specifically, we employed a tri-component attitude model to analyze questionnaire data from 446 randomly selected students. Our results indicate that participants had a good knowledge of MEP. Furthermore, our data revealed the following three MEP-related attitudinal clusters: activists, supporters, and onlookers. Activists showed negative attitudes toward MEP with strong anti-MEP behaviors. Supporters also had negative attitudes toward MEP but performed less anti-MEP behaviors. Finally, onlookers exhibited indifferent attitudes with neutral MEP-related behaviors. Each of the three attitudinal clusters varied according to the demographic characteristics of the participants. The implications of these results on the reduction in MEP were discussed.