An Empirical Study on the Mechanism of College Students’ Green Consumption in China
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Gao Jie , Yuan Ke , Song Jaehoon 
Published: April 2019

With the rapid development of the economy, the problems of environmental pollution, climate change and resource exhaustion have become increasingly prominent. With the rapid development of the global economy, the problems of environmental pollution, climate change and resource exhaustion have become increasingly prominent. For these environment problems, the international community has put forward the development model of low-carbon economy, required every country to change their production and consumption patterns, reduce carbon emissions and protect the environment in recent years. Faced with the pressure of international community and the requirement of domestic sustainable development, Chinese government has proposed to reform deeply and drive by innovation, foster ecological culture, and adhere to the development of green and low-carbon cycles. The construction of ecological civilization should start from young people, start from the education of family and school, and comprehensively accelerate the transformation of the whole people into a diligent, green and low-carbon way.
The number of Chinese college students with a college degree or above is 3,017.54 million in 2018. A large number of college students with high-level scientific and culture are easy to accept new things and more concerned about the fate of human beings. Therefore, researching on the influencing factors and driving mechanism of college students’ green consumption is not only helpful to guide and educate the college students’ green consumption, but also to explore and cultivate the potential main force and future leaders of green consumption.
Currently, the research on green consumption focuses on the analysis of consumers’ subjective will variables, while it involves individual objective ability and external situational factors, but mostly ignores the interaction between them and subjective will. Because green consumption is affected by subjective and objective factors, internal and external factors, it is necessary to introduce individual subjective will, individual objective ability and external factors into the green consumption model at the same time.
Firstly, through sorting out and comparing the relevant research theories, it found that interpersonal behavior theory, environmental literacy model, responsible environmental behavior theory, planned behavior theory, attitude-behavior-condition theory, and value-belief-norm theory are the six most influential environmental behavior models. This paper proposes an improved responsible environmental behavior model through appropriately adjusting Hines’ responsible environmental behavior model. In combination with the characteristics of Chinese College students, environmental emotion, environmental problem cognition, environmental responsibility, social cognition, vipassana control, utility values, objective ability, subjective will, face culture and policy incentives are selected as the main influencing factors of green consumption, which are divided into three groups: individual subjective will, individual objective ability and external situational factors according to the improved responsible environmental behavior model.
Secondly, the sample data of the impact mechanism of green consumption of university students are obtained through the analysis of 812 valid questionnaires issued and retrieved by junior college students, undergraduate students and doctoral students from four university towns.This data was tested for reliability and validity test, correlation analysis, hierarchical regression, multiple regression and adjustment effect analysis by SPSS and Amos.