The attitudes of undergraduate students toward environment and environmental issues

Identifying attitudes toward environment and environmental issues may provide insight in predicting future behaviors and preferences on environmental issues. It may have implications for educational, social and cultural activities and actions intended to develop pozitive attitudes toward environmental issues. The purpose of this study was to describe the environmental attitudes of undergraduate students in Gazi Education Faculty. A conceptual framework was developed to define the dimensions of environmental issues and attitudes toward environment. Based on this conceptual framework and a review of related literature, a 43-items attitude scale was developed. This scale was reduced to 21 -items after an initial administration of the scale and factor analysis of the initial data. Subjects for this study were 20% of all undergraduate students enrolled in Gazi Education Faculty. Stratified sampling technique was used to select 20% of students from each department. Data were analyzed to examine the significance of the differences in attitude scores by sex, department, geographical region, years in college, rural-urban, father's educational level, father's occupation and the income level of family by using t-test, one-way ANOVA and two-way ANOVA. Results indicated that there were significant differences in students' environmental attitudes by sex, department, rural-urban, father's educational level, father's occupation and the income level of family. There were no differences by geographical region and years in college.