Environmental Attitudes among Youth: How Much Do the Educational Characteristics of Parents and Young People Matter?

Andrej Kirbiš ()
Additional contact information
Andrej Kirbiš: Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Koroška Cesta 160, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 15, 1-14

Abstract: Research shows that education increases environmental attitudes, yet there is a lack of studies examining young people’s attitudes and the role of various educational characteristics in youth’s environmental engagement. The main aim of our study was to examine how several educational characteristics of young people and their parents impact youth’s environmental attitudes. We employed a survey sample of 14–34-year-olds (N = 1508; M age = 19.25 years) collected in January 2020. The impact of five educational variables was tested: maternal and paternal educational level; students’ educational stage (primary, secondary and tertiary school students); educational track of secondary students (vocational, professional and general); and youth’s educational status (currently in education vs. not in education). We controlled for several demographic and economic confounding factors in multivariate analyses. These indicate significant between-track differences in environmental attitudes among secondary school students, while educational status and educational stage have no significant impact on environmental attitudes. In addition, the father’s (but not the mother’s) education increases Slovenian youngsters’ environmental attitudes. As findings indicate significant differences between educational tracks of secondary students independent of their parental education and other personal and family characteristics, educators may want to revise vocational and professional secondary school syllabuses to include an increased number of environmental, climate change and sustainability topics.

Keywords: environmental attitudes; educational characteristics; school track; parental education; young people (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/15/11921/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/15/11921/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:15:p:11921-:d:1209457

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().