CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Hevesi, Flora Eva |
|---|---|
| Title | Behind pro-environmental behaviours: Comparing the perceptions of students from democratic and non-democratic schools |
| Summary | The study of human behaviour is dominant in the environmental scholarship because of its potential impact towards catalysing pro-environmental behavioural changes. The influential self-determination theory (SDT) focuses on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that are determined by the level of autonomy support in one’s social and educational environment. Former applications of the framework produced valuable insights about the factors that affect motivation; however, they are overwhelmingly quantitatively oriented, which prevents them from eliciting the underlying patterns, perceptions and assumptions regarding environmental motivation and behaviour. The qualitative analysis of tacit knowledge is essential to the comprehensive understanding of pro-environmental behaviours and developing effective environmental educational policies. This paper fills this gap by conducting focus group research comparing the environmentalism-related perceptions of secondary school students from two educational environments with different levels of autonomy support. The thematic analysis reveals that children are pessimistic about the effectiveness of environmental protection. In comparison, students with low autonomy-support have weaker in-depth understanding about environmental processes and cause-and-effect relationships. They perceive the world of environmental protection as difficult to navigate, which diminishes their intrinsic motivation to approach sustainability pro-actively. Furthermore, they are more frustrated with the perceived hypocrisy of environmental awareness programs and authority figures. |
| Supervisor | Batory, Agnes |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/hevesi_flora-eva.pdf |
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