Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors Among Jeju Islanders, South Korea - Island Futures: Conservation and Development Across the Asia-Pacific Region - page 115

Findings
Levels of Consumerism, Environmentalism,
and Environmental Behavior
The response scores for the three scales ranged from 18 to 90 for consumerism, from
15 to 75 for environmentalism, and from 12 to 72 for environmental behavior. A higher
score indicates a higher level of consumerism, environmentalism, and environmentally
friendly behavior. Mean scores of the seven independent variables were calculated
by their each category for convenient comparison, and then the mean scores were
adjusted on the basis of a maximum score of 100 for all three scales. Analysis of
variance (ANOVA) was used for examining the statistical significance of difference
in the mean score among the categories of each independent variable (see Table 9.5 ).
The mean level of consumerism was the lowest overall at 48.6 (out of 100). The
mean level of environmentalism was relatively high at 70.3, and environmentally
friendly behavior was the highest at 79.5. The difference in the overall mean level
of the three scales was statistically significant at 0.1%.
Consumerism did not significantly differ by gender, residential area, or religion,
whereas environmentalism did not significantly vary by gender, residential area, or
monthly income. Gender was the only independent variable that did not make
difference in the level of the three scales.
Consumerism generally decreased as age increased and level of civic activity
decreased, but it increased with higher educational attainment and monthly income.
Environmentalism increased as age, educational attainment, and amount of civic
engagement increased. Those who professed no religion had the highest level of
environmentalism, followed by Christians, others, and Buddhists.
Environmentally friendly behavior generally increased with age and level of
civic engagement but decreased with level of educational attainment. Rural residents
exhibited more environmentally friendly behavior than urban residents. Members
of all three religious categories had higher levels of environmentally friendly
behavior than interviewees who had no religion.
The Structure of Consumerism, Environmentalism,
and Environmental Behavior
Table 9.5 shows the overall adjusted mean levels of consumerism, environmentalism,
and environmental behavior. The response to each scale item is supposed to be
correlated with the other scale items within each scale. For example, the responses
to the 18 question items of consumerism are supposed to be structured as a set of
clusters in terms of high correlation.
The structure of consumerism, environmentalism, and environmental behavior
in terms of their correlations can thus be extracted. A cluster of highly correlated