Omani students' views about global warming: beliefs about actions and willingness to act

Abstract

A 44-item questionnaire was designed to determine students' views about how useful various specific actions might be in helping to reduce global warming, their willingness to undertake these various actions and the extent to which these two might be related. The instrument was administered to students in Grades 6 to 12 (N = 1532) from 12 schools in the Sultanate of Oman. The findings indicated that the majority of Omani students believe that global warming is happening now, and are concerned about it. Students are willing to undertake some actions, such as switching off unused domestic appliances, more than others, such as using public transport, despite the fact that they believe the latter would reduce global warming. Novel indices were constructed to explore the relationship between belief and willingness to act for specific actions. The findings suggest that the link between belief and willingness to act is stronger for some actions, such as increasing recycling, than others, such as using smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. This approach allows us to identify pro-environmental actions that may, in terms of effecting behaviour change, be useful to include in teaching schemes.