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A comparison of variables affecting three kinds of environmental intention held by members of environmental groups in Taiwan

In Taiwan, the environmental protection actions that people usually take are "physical actions", such as picking up litter, sorting trash, installing household resource-conserving devices. Other kinds of actions¡Xe.g., persuasive actions, civic action (such as signing for environmental causes, petitioning and lobbying) ¡Xare far less common. However, the latter actions, especially civic actions, are more effective than physical actions in pushing the government to adopt proenvironment policies and thus have more far-reaching impacts. This study thus focused on three civic and persuasive actions¡Xsigning for environmental causes, lobbying, and being an ecotourism interpreter. And since these actions are usually taken as a group action (people do so either because they are members of environmental groups or other NGOs, or because they join the actions of these organizations) , this study took environmental group members as its target population. A survey of intentions regarding the above three kinds of actions was made, with 210 environmental group members as respondents.
Two models were used to predict these behaviors. One was the theory of planned behavior (TPB) proposed by Ajzen (1988, 1991) , the other one was an integrated model based on theories from three disciplines¡Xsocial psychology, environmental education, public health¡Xand literatures of society mobilization. The integrated model contained 8 predictors, 4 of which were from the TPB (the subjective norm variable in the TPB was further split into 2 variables: subjective norm with respect to family members, subjective norm with respect to community members) . The other 4 variables were environmental moral obligation, environmental attitude, response efficacy and collective efficacy. Results showed that both the TPB and integrated models could predict all three kinds of environmental intention (R2 > .49 for each model and intention) . The integrated model, however, was not better than the TPB model in predicting the intention to lobby. And it was only a little better in predicting the intentions to sign and to be an interpreter. Implications of these results and suggestions for environmental groups and environmental education organizations were discussed.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0412104-095838
Date12 April 2004
CreatorsCheng, Shih-i
ContributorsSanpui Lam, none, none, none, none
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0412104-095838
Rightsunrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive

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