University students' perspectives on conscious consumption and an application

It is a known fact that resources are limited while consumer needs are illimitable. Consumers are expected to be rational and conscious when satisfying their needs. In this sense, ''Are university students a conscious consumer?'' is the research question applied with this study. The "Rational Consumption" scale developed by Kuru (2014) is used to serve the purpose of the research. The concept of conscious consumption has many sub-dimensions and one of them is rational consumption based upon logic. The data of this research has been obtained through a questionnaire from students studying at Akdeniz, Antalya Bilim and Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat Universities. It has been tried to discover whether the socio-demographic characteristics of the students affect whether they know their rights as consumers and whether they are conscious consumers (or not). The data of the survey is encoded and analyzed using the package program. According to the findings of the research, being a conscious consumer and knowing their rights as consumers has no relation with education level, income, university. When examined in terms of education level, which is one of the socio-demographic characteristics, it is found that graduate students are more conscious consumers than undergraduate students in terms of only being conscious consumer. Keywords: Conscious consumption, Conscious consumer, University Student