Like father, like son? Intergenerational transmission of values, attitudes, and behaviours in the environmental domain

Abstract

Research question: How is young people's pro-environmental orientation related to their parents' pro-environmental values, attitudes, and behaviours? To answer this question, we examine parent-adolescent (aged 16-18) similarities of values, attitudes, and behaviour related to three common household practices: purchasing environmentally friendly products, curtailing electricity use, and handling waste in a sample of 601 Danish families. Findings: We find that adolescents are less environmentally committed than their parents. This 'generation gap' appears in measures at all levels of abstraction: from environmental values to attitudes towards the performance of specific pro-environmental behaviours, and to the performance of these behaviours.

A Conceptual Framework of the Adoption and Practice of Environmental Actions in Households

“…However, by taking the individual as the unit of analysis, such work has typically ignored the relevance of the social context of the household to the adoption and practice of EAs. A growing number of studies have begun to take the household as the unit of analysis and have highlighted issues such as a link between gender, the domestic division of labour and involvement in EA adoption and practice [5,[9][10][11]15,17,21,22], patterns of communication within the household regarding EAs [9,11,16], and parent to child, child to parent and adult to adult socialisation influences [3][4][5][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. However, the household perspective on EA participation remains under-researched.…”

“…Such situations have been referred to as children resocialising the family [131], reverse socialisation [4] and ecological resocialisation [16]. However, Grønhøj and Thøgersen [4] noted that in terms of intergenerational influence, parent to child socialisation influence is the dominant direction, and along with Grønhøj and Thøgersen [13], presented evidence to demonstrate the significant influence of family socialisation on adolescents' orientation with respect to EAs. This links with the point made in the "maintenance of repetitive environmental actions" section regarding the role of socialisation influence from parent to child in shaping routine and habitual behaviour and thus determining what is seen as normal practice.…”

“…While some research programs have focused on households, they have been concerned with developing socially and technologically innovative scenarios for sustainable household consumption [3][4][5], rather than relying on efficiency-based EAs. The work of Shove [6,7] has examined how practices pertaining to environmentally significant consumption are shaped within everyday life, but a growing number of studies have explicitly taken the household as the unit of analysis and begun to explore how individuals within households interact with respect to the adoption and practice of EAs [3][4][5][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. For example, as highlighted above, one factor which is deemed to influence behaviour is social norms.…”

How National Culture and Parental Style Affect the Process of Adolescents’ Ecological Resocialization

“…First, mothers in general tend to represent the emotional anchor and the parent more involved in parenting [51]. Second, mothers rather than fathers are generally considered the primary source of socialization, specifically for pro-environmental practices [52]. We use the term "adolescents" in our study, which encompasses young people from the age of 13 years to 18 years.…”

Disentangling household and individual actors in explaining private electricity consumption

“…Hence, they compound household and individual characteristics to explain consumption at the individual or household level (Abrahamse & Steg, 2009;Gatersleben et al 2002;Newton & Meyer, 2012;Poortinga et al 2004;Whitmarsh, 2009). This approach is oversimplifying because the household's electricity consumption is the outcome of all household members' (potentially even conflicting) activities, whereas the characteristics of one respondent can no more than approximate the characteristics of all household members (Longhi, 2013;Grønhøj & Ölander, 2007;Grønhøj & Thøgersen, 2009;Thøgersen & Grønhøj, 2010).…”