Investigating Alpha Generation Individuals' Awareness Climate Change

2023-1-25
Öztürk, Özgü
There is an increase in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), and ozone (O3) because of rapid population growth and industrialization. The extreme increase in greenhouse gas emissions is causing the world to warm more than normal. The increase in temperature is called global warming. Global climate change occurs as a result of global warming. Alpha generation individuals are seriously affected by climate change, which has become a global problem. According to the results of the research published in the journal Science, individuals of the alpha generation will be exposed to an average of 2.6 times more drought, 3 times more shortages of crops, and 2 times more forest fires than other generations. The report published by UNICEF in August 2020, also shows that 1 billion children were exposed to air pollution and 920 million children were exposed to water scarcity. This study investigates the awareness of the alpha generation individuals in Turkey toward climate change in terms of five dimensions; attitude, personal concern, knowledge, multiplicative action, and climate-friendly behavior. In the pilot study, which is the first stage of the study, the Turkish version of the scale was applied to 110 alpha-generation individuals, and validity and reliability studies were conducted. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) results confirmed that the proposed structure had five factors, explaining 57.7% of the total variance. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the scale was calculated as 0.723. It was concluded that this value is good and acceptable. In the main group study, which is the second stage of the study, descriptive statistics were used to descriptively interpret the awareness of alpha generation individuals toward climate change, correlation analysis to understand the relationship between the five factors, and two-step cluster analysis to learn the profiles of 295 alpha generation individuals participating in the main study. According to the results of the analysis, it was revealed that Turkish alpha-generation individuals for the problem of climate change were gathered into two groups paralyzed (N=193, 65.4%) and concern activists (N=102, 34.6%). In addition, it has resulted that there was no strong relationship between the knowledge factor and other factors and the 11-year-old girl students were more aware of climate change than the boy students. Environmental education that will be given from an early age can contribute to the increase of students' knowledge about climate change.

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Citation Formats
Ö. Öztürk, “Investigating Alpha Generation Individuals’ Awareness Climate Change,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2023.