| The need for interdisciplinary approaches to solving environmental problems has been increasingly recognized. This trend encourages an emphasis of social-psychological perspectives given to research on improving the understanding of human-environment dynamics. With the recognition that human behavior is inherently complex, value-laden, and particularly situation specific, a broad spectrum of psychological, social, and cultural analyses for its understanding is required. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine a culturally adaptive model involving appropriate patterns of environmental behavior in a developing country—Taiwan. In the model, the underlying social and psychological factors that would determine individuals' attitudinal responses toward tendencies of appropriate environmental behavior were assessed.; By means of questionnaire data randomly collected from a sample of college students (236/300 = 78.7% response rate) in Taipei City of Taiwan, seven major scales of variables were measured: socio-demographic characteristics, situational factors, personality variables, perceived external & internal barriers to action, environmental attitudes, perceived self-efficacy toward action, and appropriate environmental behavior (AEB). Stepwise multiple regression analyses were performed to identify the most parsimonious set of the determinants that will best predict environmental behavior, as well as to recognize the most important behavior(s) that were also perceived as the appropriate actions for intent of adoption to the respondents.; Of the thirteen variables finally taken into account in the multiple regression analysis, the most parsimonious set of predictors for the total AEB scale were: perceived importance of environmental behavior (β = .41, p < .001), perceived self-efficacy (β =.22, p < .001), status of study (β = .15, p < .001), pastoralism (β = .15, p < .01), internal barriers (β = −.10, p < .05), antiquarianism (β = .10, p < .05), and membership in NGOs (β = .10, p < .05). Combining the effects derived from these social psychological indicators, a total of 61% of the variance was explained for the model as a whole.; Implications for theory, practice, and future research on environment-behavior studies as well as the pursuit of environmental education/communications were discussed. |
