Study of Intervening Effect of Environmental Responsible Attitude on the Relationship of between Place Attachment and Environmental Responsible Behavior

Study about environmental behavior and its effective factors is the basic issue in environmental sociology. Most studies emphasis on attitudes, knowledge and awareness about environment ant its risks. Few of them have focused on other social and environmental factors such as place attachment. Theoretical approaches that were employed in this paper are Low and Altman theory of place attachment (1992) and New ecological paradigm (NEP) of Dunlap and Van Liere. According to these theoretical approaches physical and social characters of places that citizens are resident of them or sometimes are present at those places, effect on type of emotions and relatedness of individuals to places. Fundamental purposes of the paper are measuring of Tabriz citizen's place attachment (attachment to their city) and then explaining the relationships between 3 variables (EA, PA and EB). Examining the relationship between environmental attitude (EA), place attachment (PA) and environmental behavior (EB) can help us to explore other factors along with environmental attitude that play important role in forming environmental behavior. In addition, in this article the effect of EA as an intervening variable was studied. Entrance of this variable in the research model is the new idea in this paper. So, hypothesis of research are:1-Place attachment and environmental responsible behavior have a significant relationship.
2-Environmental responsible attitude and environmental responsible behavior have a significant relationship.
3- Place attachment effects on environmental responsible behavior by environmental responsible attitude.
Material& Methodologically, this paper is extensive study and in terms of time is sectional one. Also, Type of This research is an applied one and method of study is Survey. We have used questionnaire as a technique of gathering data. Statistical society is 15 to 75 years old citizens of Tabriz and the sample size is 442 that were selected by cluster sampling. In questionnaire used in this research several scales have been applied for measuring all of the dependent and independent variables. Stern scale (2000) and milfont and dukitt scale (2010) were applied in this questionnaire for measurement of EB and EA. PA is a new, complicated and multidimensional concept in social science especially is used mostly in urban sociology and urban planning. But few studies have attempted to define it operationally. So we created a new scale for PA with combining and summarizing 4 scales and then assessed validity and reliability of them. Validity of questionnaire was checked with confirmatory factor analysis and reliability of that was checked whit cronbach’s alpha. For analyzing data was used SPSS software. Also, we used structural equation modeling with LISREL software to explore multivariate relationships because of existence of errors and covariance between indices. Furthermore, goodness of fit statistics was calculated with this software.
Discussion and Results show that attachment of citizens to the social and physical environment of Tabriz is higher than 70 percent. So, descriptive statistics show that places despite of Late Modernity’s overcoming on the global space, Globalization and space – time density have an important role in forming of emotions and identities of human beings. In this research average score of EB and EA are 74.5 and 75.83. Also, research literature provides evidence confirming the effect of place attachment on attitudes and behaviors in different areas of human life such as environmental attitudes and behaviors. The result of SEM in this paper confirmed that EA and PA directly effect on EB and their path coefficients are .53 and .23. Place attachment and environmental attitude as independent variables have explained about 11 percent of environmental behavior as a dependent variable. Furthermore, multiple correlation of these variables is .32. Also, intervening effect of EA in relationship of PA and EB is confirmed. Goodness of fit indexes such as CFI, GFI and AGFI are more than .9 and it is adequate result. On the other hand, RMSEA as the other important goodness of fit index was calculated in Lisrel and .03 was obtained. Numbers less than .06 for RMSEA are acceptable and indicate fitness of assumed model. Relationships obtained are the approvals for importance of social and psychological factors such as place attachment in forming of environmental behaviors beside the environmental attitudes. Existence of important places in the usual life of people can perform vital role in forming of responsible emotions, values and norms toward their environment. These positive and responsible emotions and values institutionalize environmental responsible attitudes that increase people intention to behave responsibly in the field of environment.