Neighborhood environmental factors correlated with walking near home: Using SPACES

Purpose: The physical environment plays an important role in influencing participation in physical activity, although the specific factors that are correlated with different patterns of walking remain to be determined We examined correlations between physical environmental factors and self-reported walking for recreation and transport near home. Methods: The local neighborhood environments (defined as a 400-m radius from the respondent's home) of 1678 adults were assessed for their suitability for walking. The environmental data were collected during 2000 using the Systematic Pedestrian and Cycling Environmental Scan (SPACES) instrument together with information from other sources. We used logistic regression modeling to examine the relationship between the attributes of the physical environment and the self-reported walking behavior undertaken near home. Results: Functional features were correlated with both walking for recreation (odds ratio (OR) 1.62; 95% confidence interval (Cl): 1.20-2.19) and for transport (OR 1.30; 95% Cl: 0.97-1.73). A well-maintained walking surface was the main functional factor associated with walking for recreation (OR 2.04; 95% Cl: 1.43-2.91) and for transport (OR 2.13; 95% Cl: 1.53-2.96). Destination factors, such as shops and public transport, were significantly correlated with walking for transport (OR 1.80; 95% Cl: 1.33-2.44), but not recreation. Conclusion: The findings suggest that neighborhoods with pedestrian facilities that are attractive and comfortable and where there are local destinations (such as shops and public transport) are associated with walking near home.

Growth expectations of business owners:impact of human capital, firm characteristics and environmental transition

This paper presents an empirical study based on a survey of 399 owners of small and medium size companies in Lithuania. Applying bivariate and ordered probit estimators, we investigate why some business owners expect their firms to expand, while others do not. Our main findings provide evidence that SME owner's generic and specific human capital matter. Those with higher education and 'learning by doing' attributes, either through previous job experience or additional entrepreneurial experience, expect their businesses to expand. The expectations of growth are positively related to exporting and non-monotonically to enterprise size. In addition, we analyse the link between the perceptions of constraints to business activities and growth expectations and find that the factors, which are perceived as main business barriers, are not necessary those which are associated with reduced growth expectations. In particular, perceptions of both corruption and of inadequate tax systems seem to affect growth expectations the most.

Making SENS:exploring the antecedents and impact of store environmental stewardship climate

Retailers increasingly recognize that environmental responsibility is a strategic imperative. However, little research has investigated or identified the factors that facilitate the successful implementation of environmentally responsible strategies across a network of customer-facing sales units (stores). We propose that a store manager’s ability to lead by example facilitates this process by fostering a supportive climate for store environmental stewardship (SENS-climate). By examining the influence of store managers’ actions on sales associates’ perceptions of the SENS-climate, as well as the subsequent impact on their performance—measured by margins, as well as sales of green and regular products—this study demonstrates that store managers can foster a SENS-climate by articulating their prioritization of environmental responsibility in their operational decisions. These positive effects are sustained by relational factors, such as the moderating effect of the store manager–sales associate dyadic tenure. In contrast, when store managers display high variability in their environmental orientation, it hinders the development of SENS-climate perceptions among sales associates. If sales associates perceive an enabling SENS-climate, they achieve higher margins and more green but fewer regular sales.

The effects of attribute quality information and sources of information on consumers' perceptions and behavior: A model of Pre-purchase Information Utilization in Service Physical Environments

The search-experience-credence framework from economics of information, the human-environment relations models from environmental psychology, and the consumer evaluation process from services marketing provide a conceptual basis for testing the model of "Pre-purchase Information Utilization in Service Physical Environments." The model addresses the effects of informational signs, as a dimension of the service physical environment, on consumers' perceptions (perceived veracity and perceived performance risk), emotions (pleasure) and behavior (willingness to buy). The informational signs provide attribute quality information (search and experience) through non-personal sources of information (simulated word-of-mouth and non-personal advocate sources).^ This dissertation examines: (1) the hypothesized relationships addressed in the model of "Pre-purchase Information Utilization in Service Physical Environments" among informational signs, perceived veracity, perceived performance risk, pleasure, and willingness to buy, and (2) the effects of attribute quality information and sources of information on consumers' perceived veracity and perceived performance risk.^ This research is the first in-depth study about the role and effects of information in service physical environments. Using a 2 x 2 between subjects experimental research procedure, undergraduate students were exposed to the informational signs in a simulated service physical environment. The service physical environments were simulated through color photographic slides.^ The results of the study suggest that: (1) the relationship between informational signs and willingness to buy is mediated by perceived veracity, perceived performance risk and pleasure, (2) experience attribute information shows higher perceived veracity and lower perceived performance risk when compared to search attribute information, and (3) information provided through simulated word-of-mouth shows higher perceived veracity and lower perceived performance risk when compared to information provided through non-personal advocate sources. ^

Black churchgoers, environmental activism, and the preservation of nature in Miami, Florida

The goal of this project was to explore activism, attitudes, and imagery connecting Black churchgoers in Miami, Florida and the natural environment. The research approach was qualitative, began as exploratory research, and used the techniques of snowball sampling, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. Three case studies representing various socio-economic levels, denominations, participant education levels, and environmental facets were chosen for in-depth ethnographic research. There are three major findings in the research. First, there is a link between the preservation of Black history and the preservation of the environment among Black churchgoers, who feel strong connections to a sense of place, rural life, and the past. However their work is strongly directed to bring about benefits for people and the environment in the present and the future. Second, public access to public lands is a basic and important right espoused by these Black churchgoing activists. Third, the vocabulary used by Black churchgoing activists regarding the natural environment differs from today's “mainstream” environmentalists. The concept of “beauty” is pivotal to Black appreciation of and activism toward the environment and is reminiscent of the early environmental protection movement in the United States and conservationists such as John Muir. These findings concerning how Black spirituality relates to the environment adds to the sparse literature on the subject, and provides for potential linkages between Blacks and “mainstream” environmental groups to benefit both parties. An understanding of the connections between Black spirituality and perceptions of the environment should facilitate the development of better programs to improve and protect the environment. Environmental projects may also address the social and economic needs of Black communities, churches, and congregations, as well as the ecosystem. ^

Perceptions of the Beach Users: A Case Study of the Coastal Areas of North Cyprus Towards Establishment of a "Carrying Capacity"

Within the main elements of economic sustainability, socio-cultural sustainability, and environmental sustainability, the criteria of 'carrying capacity’ have ben emphasized through residents’ perception analysis to explore practical methods towards the application and implementation of such criteria. As data analysis revealed, the main tourist resources in the case of North Cyprus –the coast and the beach- have a certain capacity to sustain the impact and pressure of tourism. Despite the significance of the indigenous environment and with respect to the residents’ perception of optimum carrying capacity levels, this issue has not been given a due consideration. This has resulted in a process of coastal development which bypasses any measure ore application of a standard to harmonize the degree of physical development and the capacity of the beach. The main objective of this paper is to establish the concept of ‘carrying capacity’ as the means to achieve the reconciliation of environmental impacts with tourism development. The study concludes that, if carrying capacity measurement and its implementation are not incorporated into the planning decision as a clear policy, there will be grave negative consequences for those resources attracting visitors.

A Comparative Study of Customer Perceptions Regarding Green Restaurant Practices: Fast Food vs. Upscale Casual

The current exploratory study was designed to determine the impact that green restaurant practices may have on intention to visit a restaurant and willingness to pay more because of those green practices. The study analyzed a convenience sample of 260 surveys from customers in fast food restaurants and 501 surveys from customers in upscale casual restaurants in the Midwestern United States (U.S.) in order to determine if there were differences in the perception of guests regarding these types of restaurants and their green practices. The findings showed that upscale casual restaurant customers believed they are knowledgeable at a higher level than the fast food restaurant customers about green restaurant practices, have a higher mean rating on the importance of environmental record and recycling in restaurants, and believed that restaurants should use local products when they can. In both groups of customers, there was a positive relationship between green practices utilized at home and customers’ willingness to pay more for green restaurant practices as well as their intention to visit the restaurant using green practices. Management implications are discussed.

Cultural perceptions of space and place in the South Florida *environment

Public opinion polls in the United States reveal that a great majority of Americans are aware and show concern about ecological issues and the need to preserve natural areas. In South Florida, natural resources have been subjected to enormous strain as the pressure to accommodate a growing population has led to rapid development. Suburbs have been built on areas that were once natural wetlands and farmlands, and the impact today shows a landscape where natural places have all but disappeared. This dissertation examines the intersection between the perceptions that individuals living in the South Florida region have with respect to the natural environment and local ecological problems with where their relationship to nature takes place. ^ The research is based upon both quantitative and qualitative data. The principal methodology used in this research is the ethnographic method, which employed the data gathering techniques of in-depth interviewing and participant observation. The objective of the qualitative portion of the study was to determine how people perceive and relate to their immediate environment. The quantitative portion of the study employed telephone survey data from the FIU/Florida Poll 2000. Data collected through this survey provided the basis to statistically test responses to the research questions. ^ The findings show that people in South Florida have a general idea of the relationship between the human population and the environment but very little knowledge of how they individually affect each other. The experience of private places and public spaces in everyday life permits people to compartmentalize cultural values and understandings of the natural world in separate cognitive schemas. The appreciation of the natural world has almost no connection to their personal sense of obligation to preserve the environment. That obligation is only felt in their home space even though the South Florida environment overall struggles desperately with water shortages, land encroachment, and a rapidly expanding human population whose activities continuously aggravate an already delicate natural balance. ^

Perceptions of practitioners : Managing marine protected areas for climate change resilience

Acknowledgements This research was supported and funded by ClimateXChange. ClimateXChange is a collaborative initiative between Scottish research and higher education institutes and is funded by the Scottish Government. The authors would like to thank all the participants who agreed to be interviewed for this study. Ethics approval number 2013001 from University of Glasgow.

A Study of How Economic Attitudes Are Shaped by Environmental Shocks and Life Experiences

Social attitudes, attitudes toward financial risk and attitudes toward deferred gratification are thought to influence many important economic decisions over the life-course. In economic theory, these attitudes are key components in diverse models of behavior, including collective action, saving and investment decisions and occupational choice. The relevance of these attitudes have been confirmed empirically. Yet, the factors that influence them are not well understood. This research evaluates how these attitudes are affected by large disruptive events, namely, a natural disaster and a civil conflict, and also by an individual-specific life event, namely, having children.

By implementing rigorous empirical strategies drawing on rich longitudinal datasets, this research project advances our understanding of how life experiences shape these attitudes. Moreover, compelling evidence is provided that the observed changes in attitudes are likely to reflect changes in preferences given that they are not driven just by changes in financial circumstances. Therefore the findings of this research project also contribute to the discussion of whether preferences are really fixed, a usual assumption in economics.

In the first chapter, I study how altruistic and trusting attitudes are affected by exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as long as ten years after the disaster occurred. Establishing a causal relationship between natural disasters and attitudes presents several challenges as endogenous exposure and sample selection can confound the analysis. I take on these challenges by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the tsunami and by relying on a longitudinal dataset representative of the pre-tsunami population in two districts of Aceh, Indonesia. The sample is drawn from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), a survey with data collected both before and after the disaster and especially designed to identify the impact of the tsunami. The altruistic and trusting attitudes of the respondents are measured by their behavior in the dictator and trust games. I find that witnessing closely the damage caused by the tsunami but without suffering severe economic damage oneself increases altruistic and trusting behavior, particularly towards individuals from tsunami affected communities. Having suffered severe economic damage has no impact on altruistic behavior but may have increased trusting behavior. These effects do not seem to be caused by the consequences of the tsunami on people’s financial situation. Instead they are consistent with how experiences of loss and solidarity may have shaped social attitudes by affecting empathy and perceptions of who is deserving of aid and trust.

In the second chapter, co-authored with Ryan Brown, Duncan Thomas and Andrea Velasquez, we investigate how attitudes toward financial risk are affected by elevated levels of insecurity and uncertainty brought on by the Mexican Drug War. To conduct our analysis, we pair the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), a rich longitudinal dataset ideally suited for our purposes, with a dataset on homicide rates at the month and municipality-level. The homicide rates capture well the overall crime environment created by the drug war. The MxFLS elicits risk attitudes by asking respondents to choose between hypothetical gambles with different payoffs. Our strategy to identify a causal effect has two key components. First, we implement an individual fixed effects strategy which allows us to control for all time-invariant heterogeneity. The remaining time variant heterogeneity is unlikely to be correlated with changes in the local crime environment given the well-documented political origins of the Mexican Drug War. We also show supporting evidence in this regard. The second component of our identification strategy is to use an intent-to-treat approach to shield our estimates from endogenous migration. Our findings indicate that exposure to greater local-area violent crime results in increased risk aversion. This effect is not driven by changes in financial circumstances, but may be explained instead by heightened fear of victimization. Nonetheless, we find that having greater economic resources mitigate the impact. This may be due to individuals with greater economic resources being able to avoid crime by affording better transportation or security at work.

The third chapter, co-authored with Duncan Thomas, evaluates whether attitudes toward deferred gratification change after having children. For this study we also exploit the MxFLS, which elicits attitudes toward deferred gratification (commonly known as time discounting) by asking individuals to choose between hypothetical payments at different points in time. We implement a difference-in-difference estimator to control for all time-invariant heterogeneity and show that our results are robust to the inclusion of time varying characteristics likely correlated with child birth. We find that becoming a mother increases time discounting especially in the first two years after childbirth and in particular for those women without a spouse at home. Having additional children does not have an effect and the effect for men seems to go in the opposite direction. These heterogeneous effects suggest that child rearing may affect time discounting due to generated stress or not fully anticipated spending needs.

Considering Efficacy of an Outdoor Environmental Education Program: Facilitating Elementary Students’ Environmental Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behaviours

Various sources have sought to consider the educational interventions that foster changes in perception of and attitudes toward nature, with the ultimate intent of understanding how education can be used to encourage environmentally responsible behaviours. With these in mind, the current study identified an outdoor environmental education program incorporating these empirically supported interventions, and assessed its ability to influence environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. Specifically, this study considered the following research questions: 1) To what degree can participation in this outdoor education program foster environmental knowledge and encourage pro-environmental attitudes and self-reported pro-environmental behaviours? 2) How is this effect different among students of different genders, and those who have different prior experiences in nature? Two motivational frameworks guided inquiry in the current study: the Value-Belief-Norm Model of Environmentalism (VBN) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The study employed a quantitative survey methodology, combining contemporary data measuring knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours with archived data collected by program staff, reflecting frequency of environmentally responsible behaviour. Further, a single qualitative item was included for which students provided “the first three words that [came] to mind when [they] think of the word nature.” Terms provided before and after the program were compared for differences in theme to detect subtle or underlying changes. Quantitative results indicated no significant change in student knowledge or attitudes through the outdoor environmental education program. However, a significant change in self-reported behaviour was identified from both the contemporary and archived data. This agreement in positive findings across the two data sets, collected using different measures and different participants, lends evidence of the program’s ability to encourage self-reported pro-environmental behaviour. Further, qualitative results showed some change in students’ perceptions of nature through the program, providing direction for future research. These findings suggest that this particular outdoor education program was successful in encouraging students’ self-reported environmentally responsible behaviour. This change was achieved without significant change in knowledge or environmental attitudes, suggesting that external factors not measured in this study might have played a role in affecting behaviour.

Chasing the Green Buck? Environmental Activism in Post-communist Baltic States

The paper investigates the dynamics and volution of issues on the agenda of Baltic environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) since the collapse of communism. The past research on Baltic environment activism suggests that these enjoy high visibility because they tapped the core societal views of natural environment as a crucial asset of a nation. As we demonstrate in this paper, the changes in agendas of Baltic environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) make clear that the rhetorical toolbox of ‘national environment’ is often used to mainly achieve greater financial gains for individual members, rather than for society at large. We illustrate how the dearth of economic opportunities for domestic public has impacted perceptions of ‘nature’ advocated by the environmental activists, focussing specifically on national perceptions of ownership and the resulting actions appropriating ‘nature’ as a source for economic development, only tangentially attaining environmental outcomes on the way. The vision that the ‘environment’ is an economic resource allowed ENGO activists to cooperate with the domestic policymaking, while tapping international networks and donors for funding. Throughout the past decades they worked to secure their own and their members' particularistic economic interests and, as we demonstrate, remained disengaged from the political process and failed to develop broader reproach with publics.

Resident perceptions of natural resources between cities and across scales in the Pacific Northwest

As the global population becomes increasingly urban, research is needed to explore how local culture, land use, and policy will influence urban natural resource management. We used a broad-scale comparative approach and survey of residents within the Portland (Oregon)-Vancouver (Washington) metropolitan areas, USA, two states with similar geographical and ecological characteristics, but different approaches to land-use planning, to explore resident perceptions about natural resources at three scales of analysis: property level (“at or near my house”), neighborhood (“within a 20-minute walk from my house”), and metro level (“across the metro area”). At the metro-level scale, nonmetric multidimensional scaling revealed that the two cities were quite similar. However, affinity for particular landscape characteristics existed within each city with the greatest difference generally at the property-level scale. Portland respondents expressed affinity for large mature trees, tree-lined streets, public transportation, and proximity to stores and services. Vancouver respondents expressed affinity for plentiful accessible parking. We suggest three explanations that likely are not mutually exclusive. First, respondents are segmented based on preferences for particular amenities, such as convenience versus commuter needs. Second, historical land-use and tax policy legacies may influence individual decisions. Third, more environmentally attuned worldviews may influence an individual’s desire to produce environmentally friendly outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of acknowledging variations in residents’ affinities for landscape characteristics across different scales and locations because these differences may influence future land-use policies about urban natural resources.

Children of Matter: Luxury Value Perceptions of Millennials in Higher Education in Europe

In recent years, the luxury market has entered a period of very modest growth, which has been dubbed the ‘new normal’, where varying tourist flows, currency fluctuations, and shifted consumer tastes dictate the terms. The modern luxury consumer is a fickle mistress. Especially millennials – people born in the 1980s and 1990s – are the embodiment of this new form of demanding luxury consumer with particular tastes and values. Modern consumers, and specifically millennials, want experiences and free time, and are interested in a brand’s societal position and environmental impact. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate what the luxury value perceptions of millennials in higher education are in Europe, seeing as many of the most prominent luxury goods companies in the world originate from Europe. Perceived luxury value is herein examined from the individual’s perspective. As values and value perceptions are complex constructs, using qualitative research methods is justifiable. The data for thesis has been gathered by means of a group interview. The interview participants all study hospitality management in a private college, and each represent a different nationality. Cultural theories and research on luxury and luxury values provide the scientific foundation for this thesis, and a multidimensional luxury value model is used as a theoretical tool in sorting and analyzing the data. The results show that millennials in Europe value much more than simply modern and hard luxury. Functional, financial, individual, and social aspects are all present in perceived luxury value, but some more in a negative sense than others. Conspicuous, status-seeking consumption is mostly frowned upon, as is the consumption of luxury goods for the sake of satisfying social requisites and peer pressure. Most of the positive value perceptions are attributed to the functional dimension, as luxury products are seen to come with a promise of high quality and reliability, which justifies any price premiums. Ecological and ethical aspects of luxury are already a contemporary trend, but perceived even more as an important characteristic of luxury in the future. Most importantly, having time is fundamental. Depending on who is asked, luxury can mean anything, just as much as it can mean nothing.