Pathological analysis of environmental pollution with emphasizing on littering in university campus (case study: students of Mazandaran University)

Social order has high importance in every society. Disturbance in a social order will have a lot of costs for society. Littering is an example of citizens’ social disorder in the field of environmental citizenship that is transformed as a social problem in our society. The purpose of this research was the pathological analysis of student’s social order with emphasizing on littering. Littering became a serious problem in all environments in our society. This problem in a university, as an educational and cultural environment, is indecent and needs to be assessed.

The study was conducted by a survey. The statistical population was all the students of Mazandaran University in the 95-96 educational semester. The sample size was 384 individuals and was collected by categorized sampling. Data were collected by questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS Amos software. Littering was the dependent variable, consisting of throwing paper, gum, and plastic. Independent variables were taken from the theory of social learning.

In this research, the theory of social learning was used as a theoretical framework to assess various reasons for littering in different environments. In this theory, every behavior is a result of learning in different environments. Of all respondents, 55.8 percent were women and 44.2 percent were men with an average age of 24. Littering among students was classified as medium. The results of the Pearson correlation showed that there was a significant relationship between littering as an indicator of social disorder with the observation of others’ littering, weak formal and informal control, imitation, and positive definition of littering. Also, path analysis showed that these variables can explain 28% of the variations in the dependent variable (littering). In multiple variable analysis, the positive definition of littering had a direct and positive effect on littering. The other variables had indirect effect on littering.

Essentially, littering is an important problem that we encounter in many environments. Nowadays, litter accumulates in rivers and city environments such as universities. The academic culture of universities requires academic persons in different fields to obey the social order. Therefore, the process of learning social order seems necessary.