A cross-national perspective on youth environmental attitudes |
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Authors: | Jelle Boeve-de Pauw Peter Van Petegem |
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Institution: | (1) Institute for Education and Information Sciences, University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium |
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Abstract: | The environmental attitudes of young people are a growing topic of interest for social scientists. Most research that aims
to explain differences in (youth) environmental attitudes focuses on the individual as the level of measurement. There is,
however, a growing body of evidence that illustrates that the context within which that individual operates can contribute
to their environmental attitudes. Based on the PISA 2006 data, and while controlling for individual characteristics, we tested
Inglehart’s ‘objective problems, subjective values’ hypothesis. This hypothesis divides the contextual influences on environmental
attitudes into (1) objective problems in the individual’s natural environment and (2) subjective values linked to post-materialistic
goals in life. We analyzed both the individual and the country level simultaneously, controlling for compositional effects,
by performing a multilevel analysis on the 2006 PISA data for youth environmental attitudes (398,750 15 year olds from 56
countries). At the individual level, the results are generally consistent with the literature; at the contextual level, the
stage of development of a country (as a proxy for post-materialistic values) is shown to be unrelated to environmental attitudes.
Both natural riches of a country and its environmental problems are shown to positively influence the environmental attitudes
of that country’s youth. These results are discussed in relation to the ‘objective problems, subjective values’ hypothesis.
The results also point towards the necessity of simultaneously assessing the effect of individual- and contextual-level characteristics
on environmental attitudes. |
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