Putting Behavior Into Context: Exploring the Contours of Social Capital Influences on Environmental Behavior. (April 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cho, Sungchul; Kang, Hyeongsik
• Is Part Of: Environment and behavior. Volume 49:Number 3(2017 Apr, )
• Page Start: 283
• Page End: 313
• Publication Date: 2017-04
• Subjects: environmental behavior -- social capital -- multilevel modeling -- contextual effect; Human ecology -- Periodicals; 304.2
• DOI: 10.1177/0013916516631801
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0013-9165

Abstract

Although well-theorized causal explanations exist at the person level, scholars of environmental behavior have long neglected the social nature of environmental activism. Using a unique data set of individuals nested within local communities along the Han River, South Korea, we propose a novel empirical model for analyzing the contextual effect of social capital on different sets of self-reported environmental behaviors. Our findings, based on multilevel structural equation modeling, indicate that the community-level construct of social capital is a significant predictor of spatial variations in both private and public environmental behaviors, whereas the person-level construct of community ties has predictive power for private environmental behavior. Understanding these multilayered paths in which social capital relates to pro-environmental behaviors provides a crucial balance to previous single-level findings.