Relationship between Religious Attitudes and Water Conservation Tendency in High School Students

Abstract

Introduction: Nowadays, water has turned into one of the biggest challenges of the current century, which can be the origin of numerous positive and negative changes across the world. Iran is one of the driest countries with a quarter of the average annual precipitation on a global scale. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between religious attitudes and tendency towards conserving water in high school students in Zarrin Dasht city, Iran. Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in 2017. To this end, 800 individuals (400 females and 400 males) were selected using random sampling method by taking into account the proportion of students in each school. To collect the data, two questionnaires of the water conservation tendency inventory containing 12 items and religious attitude questionnaire with 60 items were employed. Then, data analysis was performed using SPSS (version 24) and by running the Chi-square test, Pearson correlation coefficient, as well as descriptive statistics (P = 0.05). Results: The mean scores of religious attitudes and tendency towards conserving water among the participants were equal to 36.18 and 175.83, respectively. Moreover, a significant relationship was found between the students’ religious attitudes, their demographic variables of age and gender, tendency to conserve water, and number of family members (p ˂ 0.05). Moreover, the correlation between religious attitudes and tendency towards saving water was also statistically significant (p ˂ 0.05, r = 0.81). Conclusion: Considering religious attitudes and tendency towards conserving water, religious and moral inputs should be reinforced related to water-saving in students. This can extend their attitudes towards optimal water consumption within the society.