16 International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change, 5(1), 16-29, January-March 2014
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ABSTRACT
Environmental citizenship is specifcally concerned with understanding the nature of global issues and taking
an active role in addressing them. The aim of the present paper is the identifcation of the characteristics that
constitute the environmental citizen among high school students in Greece. Literature review revealed the
characteristics that an environmental citizen should possess. Thus, a research was conducted via a closed-type
questionnaire in order to identify those characteristics in the students’ responses. The results suggest that the
knowledge of the students on certain environmental issues is suffcient. Also, the major motive for participa-
tion in environmental activities is the high level of awareness of the students about the global environment.
Finally, a classifcation of high school students in fve clusters, describing the relevance of their responses to
the environmental citizenship characteristics, is presented.
Are Greek High School Students
Environmental Citizens?
A Cluster Analysis Approach
Despina Sdrali, Department of Home Economics and Ecology, Harokopio University, Athens,
Greece
Nikolaos Galanis, Department of Home Economics and Ecology, Harokopio University,
Athens, Greece
Maria Goussia-Rizou, Department of Home Economics and Ecology, Harokopio University,
Athens, Greece
Konstadinos Abeliotis, Department of Home Economics and Ecology, Harokopio University,
Athens, Greece
Keywords: Cluster Analysis, Education, Environmental Citizen, Greece, Secondary Schools
INTRODUCTION
In today’s complex world, issues of the global
environmental movement, coupled with the
growing public awareness of ecological
problems, do not seem to have worked out
as expected. Despite the increasing attention
given to the idea of environmental citizenship,
there is still an unresolved problem, i.e. how to
move from theory to practice. What causes the
discrepancy is that although every citizen is ex-
pected to act in an environmentally responsible
manner, this does imply that, at the same time,
his actions will also be enhancing his personal
interests. Or in other words, as Dobson (2007)
states, environmental citizenship involves the
recognition that self-interest behaviour will not
always protect or sustain public goods such as
the environment.
Rethinking new models of citizenship
should begin from this fact. For everyone, there
DOI: 10.4018/ijissc.2014010102