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School of Environment and Natural Resources

CFAES

Honors Research Presentation

Jul 19, 2013, 11:30am - 12:30pm

David Perzynski will present his Honors Research Defense on Friday, July 19, at 11:30 a.m. in 385 Kottman Hall. His presentation will be Predicting Sustainable Lifestyle Behaviors: A Comparison against Environmental Behaviors.

Thanks to empirical data from Environmental Psychology and Environmental Policymaking, it is commonly cited that measures such as political ideology, worldview, age, gender and income can help predict environmental behavior. The purpose of this research will be to find relationships between these measures and survey correspondents’ self-reported likelihood to engage in sustainable lifestyle behaviors. Motivations for engaging in sustainable lifestyle behaviors are often different than those for engaging in environmental behavior, meriting a case for separate research. For how salient sustainability has become in the 21st century, it is surprising how little empirical research exists to link sustainability with previous research in other fields. The findings of this research are then compared against the previous studies on environmental behavior. The results of this research show that ones’ political ideology, worldviews, and other measures can be used to predict sustainable lifestyle behaviors in a way that parallels environmental behavior, though, as expected, the link between the two types of behaviors is not perfect. In practice, these findings will hopefully help bridge the ‘academic void’ of empirical research pertaining to the field of sustainability.