Designing a Structural Model for Explaining Environmental Attitude and Behavior of Urban Residents (Case of Tehran)

Abstract

Earlier, environmental problems have been considered as technical and economic problems. In the last decades of the twentieth century the societal dimensions of environmental problems and environmental issues attracted more public attention. As a result of this circumstances a new social scientific discipline, “environmental sociology†was appeared to investigate the environmental behavior of the societies. This paper is an attempt to investigate the environmental issue in grate Tehran and design a structural model for explaining environmental Attitude and behavior of urban residents. To achieve this objective a conceptual model derived out from review of literature to examine structural relations among personal factors, attitude towards environment and environmental behavior. To examine this model, 1200 individuals of Tehran residents were randomly chosen and interviewed about their opinion on environmental legislations, environmental knowledge and information, environmental attitude and behavior. The results of this study show that for Tehran residents the environment is not yet thought to be an important problem, when compared with other social and economic issues. Overall, results of the survey show that people are ready to spend time or to organize themselves to take part in a campaign to protect the environment, but they believe that money for environmental protection should come from the government. The structural model indicates that, feeling of stress, environmental information, preparedness to act and environmental legislation have an important impact on environmental attitude and behavior.