Analysis Of Factors Influencing The Environmental Behavior Of Rural Households In Mountainous Areas Of South Shaanxi

Nowadays, the eco-environmental problems have becomeincreasingly significant, and been the important factors to restrictthe sustainable development of society and economy. Concerningthe large mountainous area and the fragile ecology of China,eco-environment is the primary problem to implement the generalstrategies of sustainable development. In order to make theeco-environment protection come into effect, every rural householdshould actively participate in this activity, and try their best toprotect the ecological environment in their daily lives. However,there are several features of the rural households in mountainousareas, such as poor living conditions, pressure of the daily life andlower demand level. Some researches suggested that the behaviorbeneficial to environmental protection was not improved with therising income. In the mountainous areas, the behavior of farmersdepends more on the social capital because of the strong traditionalculture. So, it is meaningful to study the households’ behavior inview of social capital.The thesis is divided into four parts: Firstly, through detailed review on related literatures, straightening out the relationsbetween every basic concept, the features including the rational inpursuing the short-term economic benefits, the irrational inneglecting protecting the environment and the communality of thebehavior of the people living together are analyzed, and the factorsprobably influencing households’ environmental behavior aresummarized. Secondly, mechanism of social capital acting onhouseholds’ environmental behavior is studied in theory. Theindividual behavior may be conditioned, guided and infected bysocial group. Social capita, as the social relationship networks,creates interest for every person and is a kind of social resource aswell. It influents the individual environmental behaviors and makethem approach to the collective behavior by information transfer,mutual imitation, timely rewards and punishment to individualbehavior, and condition, regulation and guidance to their behaviorand emotion. Thirdly, based on the data collected from aquestionnaire in Ankang, five aspects of the households, such asthe environmental consciousness, environmental behavior, socialcapital, social-demographic characteristics and family economicconditions, were briefly introduced. Finally, based on thetheoretical analysis and statistical analysis, with the help of thelogistic regression analysis, empirical studies of significancetesting between indicators representing environmental behaviorsand indicators of every influencing factor were made in order tolook into the main factors Influencing environmental behavior. Atthe end of this paper is the conclusion and salutations.The results show that: in the households in mountainous areas, no significant relationship is found between environmentalawareness and environmental behavior. However, the relationshipbetween environmental behavior and several indicators ofsocial-demographic characteristics and family economic conditionsis significant. The influence of social capital on environmentalbehavior is significant in many indicators, especially inmacroscopic aspect, such as its community feature. What’s more,constraint of code and rules of conduct, emotion and trust onbehavior is the main factor that influences the environmentalbehavior of households.