Texas Latino College Student Attitudes Toward Natural Resources and the Environment

Abstract

Latinos in the United States are an increasing segment of the population and are becoming important stakeholders in the management of natural resources. Although Latinos have been included in attitudinal research on environmental concerns, few studies have focused exclusively on Latino attitudes toward natural resources and the environment. We surveyed Texas college and university students of Mexican descent (n = 635) to determine their environmental concerns. Using the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), we determined an environmental concern score for each respondent and compared this index to several demographic variables. We found that gender, a political candidate's environmental position, mother's education, combined parental income, and, to a lesser degree, the number of grandparents born in the United States and religiosity (church attendance), were important model variables. We hypothesized that acculturation would be an important factor in predicting NEP scores; however, acculturation level was not an important predictor in our study, which we attribute to both the nature of our sample (i.e., highly acculturated college students) and small sample sizes of less‐acculturated college students. We recommend that future research consider determining the importance of acculturation in Latino attitudes toward natural resources and the environment.

Gender differences in environmental behaviors in China

“…Second, we found that in urban China men were significantly more concerned with environmental issues than women. This finding stands in sharp contrast to findings in the West, where women are typically more environmentally concerned (e.g., Lopez et al 2007). This finding has important implications with regard to both theory and policy.…”

Environmental Concern and Action: A View from the Border

“…Consistent with the study of Latino college students previously described (Lopez et al, 2007), a number of studies have found that women scored higher than men on measures of environmental concern (Klineberg, McKeever, & Rothenbach, 1998;Olli, Grendstad, & Wollebaek, 2001;Johnson et al, 2004). At the same time, some studies have shown that women engage in less pro-environmental behavior than men (Olli et al, 2001;Johnson et al, 2004) and that men and women engage in different types of environmental activism (Johnson et al, 2004;McStay & Dunlap, 1983).…”

“…In a survey of Latino college students in Texas, however, Lopez et al (2007) found that generational status, as measured by the number of grandparents in the United States, had less effect on respondents' environmental concern than other structural variables such as gender and income. Specifically, environmental concern was significantly higher for women than for men and was positively related to the combined incomes of the respondents' parents.…”

“…Additional insight is provided by survey research comparing ethnic groups (Johnson, Bowker, & Cordell, 2004) or focusing specifically on Latinos (Lopez, Torres, Boyd, Silvy, & Lopez, 2007). Cultural studies suggest that Latinos are likely to view people as connected to the natural environment rather than separate from it, which is the typical view in the dominant culture (Lynch, 1993).…”

“…The positive correlation between parental income and environmental concern in the study by Lopez et al (2007) raises the more general question of the relationship between affluence and environmental concern, a topic that has sparked considerable scholarly discussion. For many years, scholars considered the hypothesis that people in less affluent nations (and by extension, lower-income people) are likely to have lower levels of environmental concern because of their greater need for goods and services.…”