Más no siempre es mejor: un estudio de los factores a nivel de país asociados con las actitudes ambientales de los adolescentes utilizando un análisis multinivel de PISA 2006

In recent decades, environmental problems have rapidly worsened to become a planetary crisis, and mounting scientific evidence supports that this crisis is anthropogenic. With the growing concern over the anthropogenic ecological crisis, there has been more attention to the factors influencing people’s pro-environmental attitudes. However, limited research on the adolescent population exists, and country-level factors were rarely explored with mixed findings. This study examines whether and how three country-level factors of national consumption, national average environmental knowledge, and national income level significantly impact students’ environmental attitudes, using multilevel modeling methods. The analysis results show that adolescents’ environmental attitudes are negatively related to the national consumption and environmental knowledge level after controlling for important individual-level factors while having no significant relationship with the national income level. This study concludes with a discussion on the future direction of environmental education and studies.