The Study On Marine Environmental Awareness Of University Students In Qingdao

After entering the21th century, land resources are gradually becoming exhausteddue to the excessive exploitation because of the rapid development of our society.As the concept of era of ocean is widely spread, more attention has been paid onsearching and exploring the resources in ocean, which inevitably aggravates theenvironmental pollution and destruction of our ecosystem. As awareness determinesbehavior, the first step to solve this problem is to improve public’s environmentalawareness and then develop the harmonious relationship between human and thenature. Marine environmental awareness consists of the environmental problemrelated experience acquired through the exploration, cognition on situation of Marineexploration, the marine environmental sentiment, and the willingness of beingphysically involved in the marine environmental protection. Improving this awarenessplays a significant role in building the harmonious relationship between human andocean. Since the university students, the subject of population of the future society,are substantial for environmental protection and sustainable development, the studyon their marine environmental awareness is theoretically and practically significant.Based on consciousness behavior theory in social psychology and environmentalsociology, focusing on the university students in Qingdao, this study builds acomprehensive evaluation system on Marine environmental awareness, which iscomposed of four aspects on environmental problem related experience, cognition onmarine environment, marine environmental sentiment, and the willingness of marineenvironmental protection. Questionnaires were designed based on this to collect dataand to conduct empirical study. During the investigation, students of OceanUniversity of China, Qingdao University and Qingdao Institute of Technology werechosen as the study objects based on stratified sampling, after which743effectivequestionnaires were collected by random sampling among the students in these threeuniversities. Furthermore, Excel and SPSS18.0were employed to analyze theinformation, and the results could be used to depict the situation of students’ marineenvironmental awareness in Qingdao and to explain the influencing factors.This work is consist of5sections. Section1introduces the backgroundinformation, the purpose of research, the significance of this study, the summary ofrelevant global research situation, as well as the definition and its constitution ofmarine environmental awareness. Section2is an overview of university students’marine environmental awareness in Qingdao, which introduce the methodology,design of questionnaire, sampling strategy, chosen of variables, as well as proposingthe assumptions and describe the primary information from the questionnaires. Withthe analysis results of the questionnaire, Section3depict the university students’marine environmental awareness in Qingdao from four aspects, which are theirenvironmental problem related experience, cognition on marine environment, marineenvironmental sentiment, and the willingness of marine environmental protection.The score of each aspect was used to evaluate each situation of marine awarenessseparately and to analyze the influencing factors profoundly. Section4summarize theresearch situation of university students’ marine environmental awareness in Qingdao, analyze the relevance of those four aspects, evaluate the current situation of students’marine environmental awareness in Qingdao and analyze the influencing factors as awhole by using the weighted average of the measured data of these four aspects. Theresult of this investigation is concluded in Section5. This part also seeks for the originof students’ marine environmental awareness, and discusses how to develop andpromote the public marine environmental awareness based on personal and socialsense of responsibility.