Chad D Hill and Dr. JoAnn Valenti, Communications
Environmental issues have become hot political topics in recent years. Many voters now consider the environmental policies of political candidates. The formation of environmental attitudes has been the subject of many studies. In this research, I measured the environmental attitudes of students enrolled in spring term classes. To learn more about the formation of these attitudes, I correlated those attitudes with knowledge of environmental issues, political party affiliation, media use, involvement in outdoor activities, and their religious beliefs.
My survey instrument was patterned after an instrument developed and validated by Dr. JoAnn Valenti (Valenti 1983). With assistance from the BYU Office of Institutional Assessment and Analysis, the survey was sent using the campus e-mail system to 938 students randomly selected from those enrolled in spring term classes. Two hundred and forty-one students responded to the survey. The survey measured environmental attitude and four other variables: media usage, environmental involvement, environmental knowledge, and support for environmental regulations. To identify whether BYU students associated environmentalism with teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, each participant was asked to respond to the following question: “Do you think that the LDS Church/Relief Society/ Priesthood quorums have an environmental message?”
Analysis of the survey data showed that ninety percent of the survey respondents held proenvironmental attitudes. This was somewhat greater than expected. Seventy-three percent of the participants scored favorably toward environmental regulations. Sixty percent of the study participants scored moderately and 25% scored high on my scale of environmental awareness. The majority of the respondents were split between low and moderate on the scale of outdoor involvement.
Interestingly, I found no correlation between environmental knowledge and environmental attitude. This suggests that other factors are primarily responsible for the formation of environmental attitudes. Media use also had no correlation with attitude. However, there was a strong correlation (r= 0.301, p= 0.01) between media use and environmental knowledge. Data showed a negative correlation (r= -0.134, p=0. 05) between outdoor involvement and environmental attitude. This suggests that those most involved in outdoor activities are less likely to consider the effects of their actions.
Analysis showed a strong correlation (r= .573, p= 0.01) between environmental attitude and support for environmental regulations. Seventy-eight percent of the participants considered themselves Republicans. Analysis showed a negative correlation (r= -0.173, p=0. 05) between those who considered themselves Republicans and environmental attitude. Similarly, there was a weak (r= -0.148, p=0. 05) negative correlation between being republican and support for environmental regulations. Over one third of my study group (36%) didn’t know whether