Paper production relies on natural resources, including trees, electricity, water, and fuel. With a growing population, the increased demand for paper is damaging the environment. In Thailand, the Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning established a policy to encourage businesses to recycle and minimize environmental impact. However, the policy failed to reach its national goal which encouraged citizens and businesses to recycle 50 percent of used material by 2008. Research indicates that a primary barrier to achieving this goal was low self-confidence among citizens to recycle effectively, and that many doubted their contribution would matter. One strategy to improve self-confidence is through effective messaging, which may be achieved by including activities and messaging that will motivate the audience to adopt pro-recycling behaviors. The purpose of this research was to understand students' motivation and intent for adopting pro-recycling behaviors so that campaign messages could be more persuasive.
The study applied two frameworks: the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the altruism model (AM). TPB reasons that attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control of an issue influence an individual's behavioral intentions. The altruism model suggests that social norms, particularly when adopted on a personal level (personal norms), influence an individual's behavior. Personal norms suggest that a person feels morally obligated to follow the norm. Previous research confirms that recycling is considered an altruistic behavior because moral obligations frequently influence a person's decision to adopt pro-environmental behaviors. However, little is known regarding how TPB and AM predict behavior. This research investigated how these theoretical frameworks influenced behavioral intent to recycle, which has been shown to influence behavior.
This research occurred in Bangkok, Thailand and focused on college students from several institutions. Although a survey instrument existed for measuring altruism, the authors had to develop one for measuring TPB. This step involved 50 in-depth interviews regarding students' opinions and beliefs of the TPB components. The participants came from 15 institutions of higher education. Next, the researchers surveyed 120 respondents from 6 of the 15 institutions to test the survey. After this initial work, the researchers disseminated a final survey to measure which framework (TPB or AM) was more influential. Participants were randomly sampled undergraduate students from 15 colleges and universities located in Bangkok and four surrounding provinces. The authors received 628 responses from student participants. The majority of the respondents were female (52%); ages ranged from 18 to 27 and the average age was 20. Participants came from varying schools or departments within universities, including Natural Sciences, Business and Administration, and Social Sciences. The survey included questions about attitudes towards recycling, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, consequence awareness, and knowledge of responsibility. The researchers also asked about recycling knowledge, past behavior, and demographics. The authors used statistics to analyze the data.
Overall findings demonstrated that perceived behavioral control (from TPB) and personal norms (from AM) most strongly influenced participants willingness to adopt recycling behaviors. In short, the more control a person believed they had over a behavior the more willing they were to adopt the behavior. The significance of personal norms suggested that if a person felt morally obligated to recycle, then they were likely to adopt recycling behaviors. Contrary to previous findings, the results suggested that TPB was more predictive of behavioral intent than AM.
In terms of TPB, societal pressure to adopt behaviors and attitudes towards recycling did not influence a person's intent to recycle. For AM, the results confirmed that altruism predicted recycling intent and that personal norms, or moral obligations, persuaded participants to adopt recycling behaviors.
The authors highlighted a few limitations of this study. First, the research failed to identify why participants did not recycle, which could be useful information to target certain audiences and create successful campaigns. Second, the study focused on behavioral intention and did not measure actual behavior. The results may differ if the researchers assessed behavior, which could impact which campaign strategies would work well. Lastly, practitioners should use caution when generalizing the results to other age groups or other countries as recycling behaviors and perceptions of recycling likely vary.
The results from this study suggest that campaign messages should focus on the perceived behavioral control of recycling. For instance, the researchers recommend that universities make recycling bins easily accessible to students so that they feel in control of their ability to recycle. Another strategy of campaign messaging includes highlighting moral obligations of recycling behavior, based on the results that personal norms had a significant influence. The authors stress the importance of creating a campaign that targets the audience. For people unfamiliar with recycling, the researchers recommend using campaigns to increase overall knowledge of recycling by demonstrating what individuals can recycle and where to recycle.
The Bottom Line
<p>This research investigated Thai college students' motivation to recycle to improve messaging campaigns and, consequently, recycling rates. The authors surveyed over 600 undergraduate students from 15 colleges and universities in Bangkok, Thailand, and surrounding provinces. The researchers applied the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the altruism model (AM) and found that two components of these frameworks were most strongly related to participants' intention to recycle: 1) perceived behavioral control from TPB, which indicated that the more control a participant felt they had over recycling, the more likely they were to adopt that behavior; and 2) personal norms from AM, which indicated a participant's moral obligation to recycle. The researchers recommend that campaign strategies emphasize the ability to recycle and moral obligations in order to persuade the audience.</p>
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