Carly Goldberg's Final Thesis in Word- with keywords

Most parents and children spend significant amounts of time together, particularly during a child’s K-12 years. Hence, the parent-child relationship may be instrumental in forming an individual’s environmental attitudes and actions. This research examines the relationship between a parent and child’s environmental beliefs, concerns, and behaviors in two ways. First, parents and their college-aged children responded to a set of questions about environmental sentiment that were derived from the Model of Responsible Environmental Behavior (Hines et al., 1987) and the Value Belief Norm Model (Stern, et al., 1999). Their responses were compared to a randomly generated population of unrelated parent/student pairs from the study population. Second, the degree of similarity of responses between related students and parents was determined. Results showed that related parent/student pairs evidenced greater similarity in environmental beliefs and behaviors than unrelated pairs, while the study population overall exhibited similar levels of environmental concern. These results suggest the existence of a relationship dynamic between parents and children that is influencing their beliefs and behaviors. Interestingly, parents engaged in a significantly greater frequency of environmentally responsible behaviors than their own children, on average. This relationship between environmental beliefs and behaviors of parents and children warrants further research to better understand the roots, dynamics and directionality of the influence. A deeper understanding of this relationship will help refine intergenerational environmental education programs that aim to transfer environmental knowledge between students and their parents.