Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (2): 363-367.

Previous Articles     Next Articles

Values, Perceived Environmental Quality and Environmental Attitudes among Undergraduate Students

  

  • Received:2013-04-10 Revised:2013-11-27 Online:2014-03-20 Published:2014-03-20
  • Contact: Liang LI

大学生群体中价值观、感知环境质量与环境意识的关系研究

李亮1,宋璐2   

  1. 1. 苏州大学
    2.
  • 通讯作者: 李亮

Abstract: Although the environmental issues have been raised more and more concerns in recent years, the reason of the raising is still not clear in China. According to the “objective problems and subjective values” hypotheses proposed by Inglehart, which were employed to explain the raising of environmental concern throughout the world, the individuals with "Post-materialist" values emphasizing self-expression and the quality of life were much more apt to give high priority to protecting the environment, than those with "Materialist" values emphasizing economic and physical security above all. And the people in the countries that had relatively severe objective environmental problems tended to have greater environmental concern. Thus the results of former studies suggested that objective problems and subjective values were both involved and about equally important. This study focused on the relationships of values, perceived environmental quality and environmental attitudes and examined the Inglehart’s hypotheses in a large group of college students. In this study, the environmental attitudes were measured by the scale of New Environmental Paradigm of Dunlap in version of 2010 with 15 items, and the values were measured by the simplified version of Post-materialist Scale established by Inglehart. Additionally, the perceived environmental quality was measured by the perception to hometown’s and national environmental issues. Based on the social network of a junior class in the department of Sociology and Social Work of Soochow University, the survey was conducted in November 2010. With the principle of the same sample proportional distribution between male and female and between inside and outside the campus, each student sent 20 copies of questionnaires to his or her current schoolmates and friends in college by Email. 677 undergraduate students from different grades and majors took part in the survey and 630 valid questionnaires were collected. The data collected was analyzed by STATA 12.0 and Lisrel 8.7. The results showed that, (1) the students with post-materialism values expressed greater environmental concern than those with materialism, and the students perceiving worse local or national environmental quality tended to have greater environmental concern; (2) perceived environmental quality had a greater impact on environmental attitudes than on environmental values; and (3) perceived environmental quality of country had a stronger effect on environmental attitudes than that of hometown did. These results supported the Inglehart’s hypotheses, and provided a new approach to explain the mechanism of individual environmental attitudes. To sum up, the raising of undergraduate students' environmental attitudes are mainly driven by the perception to environmental degradation, especially by the perception to the national environmental issues.

Key words: Post-materialism, Perceived environmental quality, Environmental Attitudes

摘要: 本研究利用一项大学生环境意识调查数据,探讨了价值观、感知环境质量和环境意识之间关系,并对英格尔哈特的“客观问题和主观价值”假设进行检验。研究结果基本支持该假设,后物质主义者比物质主义者的环境意识更强,感知环境质量差者比感知环境质量好者的环境意识更强。此外,研究还发现,感知环境质量比价值观对大学生的环境意识作用更强;感知中国环境质量比感知家乡环境质量对大学生的环境意识作用更强。

关键词: 后物质主义, 感知环境质量, 环境意识