University Students’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behaviors Related to Marine Environment Pollution

Recent research on marine environment pollution (MEP) has primarily focused on legislative and market-based instruments rather than on understanding related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Within this context, we used a survey of university students in China to investigate attitudes and behaviors related to MEP. Specifically, we employed a tri-component attitude model to analyze questionnaire data from 446 randomly selected students. Our results indicate that participants had a good knowledge of MEP. Furthermore, our data revealed the following three MEP-related attitudinal clusters: activists, supporters, and onlookers. Activists showed negative attitudes toward MEP with strong anti–MEP behaviors. Supporters also had negative attitudes toward MEP but performed less anti–MEP behaviors. Finally, onlookers exhibited indifferent attitudes with neutral MEP-related behaviors. Each of the three attitudinal clusters varied according to the demographic characteristics of the participants. The implications of these results on the reduction in MEP were discussed.