The investigation of environmental risk perception and attitudes towards the environment in secondary school students

In the study, secondary school students’ perceptions of environmental risk perceptions and their attitudes towards the environment were investigated. The study was conducted on 1003 secondary school students from Ankara, Turkey. Survey method is used in this study which is a descriptive research. To determine state of students’ environmental risk perception the Environmental Appraisal Inventory (EAI) was used. New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale was used to determine student attitudes towards the environment. Multivariate analysis (MANOVA) has been used to determine whether class, school type and gender makes a difference in the risk perceptions. The relationship between environmental risk perceptions and environmental approaches were determined the Pearson correlation coefficient. In the MANOVA test, it was determined that the genders, school type and class levels showed significant difference in terms of scores obtained from the EAI scale.