The Effects of Emergent Norms and Attitudes on Recycling Behavior

Abstract

Residence hall residents indicated their attitudes about recycling and their perceptions of whether friends and family believed they should recycle at the beginning and toward the end of a semester. They also reported their recycling behavior at the end of the semester. Attitudes, but not subjective norms, predicted behavior, and participants became more similar to their fellow group members in attitudes and behavior over time. Attitudes and fellow group member behavior best predicted recycling, supporting the theory of reasoned action, dynamic social impact theory, and their integration.

Encouraging Vietnamese Household Recycling Behavior: Insights and Implications

“…Whilst this finding supports several research findings [25,31], it contradicts studies in Greece [30] and the US [6], which demonstrate recycling behavior is not motivated by group and social norms. A possible explanation for the significant relationship is that Vietnam is a collectivist society [48]; hence Vietnamese people pay great attention to family and social norms.…”

“…Terry et al [24] and Schwab et al [6] negate the importance of support from parents and friends by concluding that the relationship between respondents' subjective norms and their recycling behavior is not significant. Nevertheless, authors like Schultz [59], Biswas et al [60] and do Valle et al [54] demonstrate that social norms explain a significant variance in waste recycling activities.…”

“…In compliance with the multiple regression method, each independent variable is weighted to ensure maximal prediction of the single dependent variable from the set of independent variables [91]. Furthermore, a considerable number of researchers have used the regression technique in their studies of ethical and recycling behavior [6,24,60,66,94,95].…”

“…According to Figure 2, there were not any clear patterns in the spread of points and the points tended to cluster towards the middle of the plot; hence the assumptions were met. of researchers have used the regression technique in their studies of ethical and recycling behavior [6,24,60,66,94,95]. Regression assumptions were checked using guidelines from Allen et al [93].…”

“…Households are the key contributor to the alarmingly increasing rate of the quantity of solid wastes which cause environmental degradation [5,6]. In addition to investment in waste treatment systems, household recycling, which involves separating newspaper, cardboard, glass bottles, aluminum cans, plastic containers, and other recyclable materials at the source [7], is of utmost importance for environmental protection [8,9].…”