How to increase students' motivation to engage in university initiatives towards environmental sustainability

Abstract

Nowadays, it is of vital importance to make students aware of the problems that can be generated by the deterioration of the environment. The purpose of this study is to establish a suitable mechanism to predict behavior and to investigate the actions that most motivate students to participate in sustainability activities both on and off campus. To achieve this objective, a sample of 1446 students from nine Latin American universities is analyzed using the CHAID algorithm as a segmentation technique. In this way, the aim is to identify the most relevant actions that allow students to be segmented according to their motivations. From a theoretical point of view, the effectiveness of this segmentation technique in the context of environmental sustainability is confirmed, and from a practical point of view, university managers are provided with guidelines on the most effective measures to motivate students to develop pro-environmental behavior.