Investigating of International Students’ Attitudes towards Recycling Through Study Abroad

Sustainability of consumption Research

Group 29

Elsa Lin

I am a first year undergraduate student who is enrolled in a vantage arts program just like my other group members in Vant 149 V04 research course. We have focused on research through the field of psychology and environmental science in social science discipline. My reason for conducting research on recycling in relation to sustainability is because I want to acknowledge the importance of our common global issue in the excessive waste generated and the possible harm of mixing garbage in one category. I have been involved in the research as the role of a Half planner and a Partly editor, research diary keeper and full researcher.

Christy Li

Hi, I am a first-year student in Vantage College also a member of research group 29. The reason for choosing recycling and sustainability as our topic is in recent decades, it has become a focus of attention and leads to plenty of impacts on people’s life and environment as well. However, a large portion of people haven’t paid too much attention yet. So this research can appeal to people to take this matter seriously by regulating personal behaviors and habits. My role is writer, part researcher and half planner.

Natsumi Tadakuma

Hi, I am a member of this research group 29, and the first year student in UBC, Vantage College. As the reason for participating in this research project, I am actually really interested in how the people’s attitudes and behaviours are affected through a new environment or cultural context. In terms of sustainability, recycling is one of the important ways to deal with growing concern of environmental problems. We believe this research leads to further exploration in the social science field as well as a help for a future sustainable world. I am taking a role of full researcher, planner, and writer.

Lingxiao Zhu

Hi, I am a first-year Vantage College student from China, one of the group members who participated in the VANT 149 V04 research program. With the purpose of arousing international students’ consciousness of recycling habits, I conducted the investigation with my team-mates to test their attitudes and behaviors. More importantly, after completing the research, I expected that the participants can realize the significance of garbage sorting so that they will become environmentally-friendly green consumers as well as understanding the intense relationship between recycling and sustainability. During the following research, I am responsible for partially researching, fulling editing and the role of writing.

Here is the brief introduction of our research, and information relevant to our topic- sustainability in consumption and further discussion of our focus of recycling attitude and behavior changes in students.

Abstract

Recently, the excessive amount of garbage has become one of the global issues and have a close relationship to the sustainability of human consumption. In order to pursue a sustainable future, we conducted a research regarding in what degree that international students’ change their behaviours and attitudes towards recycling based on the changes of campus setting, the influence of education and involvement of cross-culture contract in their home countries and UBC as well. In this research project, we investigated interviews on UBC international first-year students.

Referring to previous studies, they have demonstrated the similarity of the attitude or behaviors which differentiated by the ethnicity or cultural contexts. According to Johnson et al. (2004), the beliefs of maintaining the balance of environment and acts including recycling in the U.S., and it differs based on their ethnicities. Ramayah & Rahbar (2013) has discovered how students think about recycling affects their behaviours of recycling with their research on Universiti Sains Malaysia students. Many researches have helped us in conducting our own project and developed the interview with the comparison of their past experience in their home country.

In our research project, we conducted qualitative research through the interviews and thematic analysis with a coding process based on the recordings of the interviews, which relates to our themes on this research or some new discovered patterns about their thoughts or the reasons for changes of attitudes and behaviours in recycling. The findings of this research will directly benefit to the institutions that aim better recycling accomplishment. In addition, this study will contribute to the improvements of people’s environmental awareness and the development of recycling habits, thereby leads to a sustainable future world as a result.

Keywords

Recycling, attitude/behaviour changes, students