One of the main aims of environmental education is to support people in realising pro-environmental behaviours (PEB). Previous literature has revealed that gender and environmental attitudes are important factors concerning people's pro-environmental behaviours. In our presentation, recent findings from a representative sample of Hungarian high school students' data regarding the relationship between environmental attitudes, gender and pro-environmental behaviours are presented.

Environmental attitudes represent individuals' value judgments concerning the natural environment (Hawcroft & Milfort, 2010). Environmental attitudes can be categorised into two main paradigms: the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP), which suggests that the environment should be subordinate to human needs, and the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), which emphasises environmental protection against human activities (Dunlap et al., 2000). Dunlap and colleagues’ (2000) revised NEP scale for measuring environmental attitudes has been criticised extensively recently for its psychometry and content (Hawcroft & Milfort, 2010; Berze et al., 2022).

Gender differences in environmental attitudes and environmentally conscious behaviours are widely studied (De Leeuw et al., 2014). Several studies indicate that women and girls have higher environmental attitudes and engage in more environmentally conscious actions, although conflicting results exist.

The conceptual framework of our presentation is built upon the basis of two important models explaining environmentally conscious behaviour. The Value-Belief-Norm model (Stern & Dietz, 1994; Klöckner, 2013) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991) both propose that the antecedents of pro-environmental behaviour - among other factors - are environmental attitudes.

The causes of these differences are theorised to lie mainly in socialisation and living conditions. For example, significant differences are found for environmental actions in the private sphere but not for public actions (Handler & Haller, 2011; Xiao & Dunlap, 2007) - a difference that can be explained in several ways. Regarding accessibility, there may also be an indirect effect of women spending more time running the household and thus being faced with more choices to act in an environmentally responsible way (Molina, 2018). Socialisation differences are closely related to this, as society tries to impart different values to girls and boys through upbringing. The former are raised to be supportive and caring. In contrast, boys are raised with a greater emphasis on responsible and rational behaviour. They are more encouraged to be proactive (Blocker & Eckberg, 1997) - which may lead them to interpret differently the social circumstances, losses and gains that proactive actions can potentially provide - and therefore, proactive actions in the public sphere are stereotyped as being more likely to be attributed to men (Dietz et al., 1998; Molina, 2018).

Our research objectives:

1) Exploring the direction and strength of the relationship between students' gender and pro-environmental behaviours.      

2) Exploring the direction and strength of the relationship between students' environmental attitudes and pro-environmental behaviours and whether these attitudes mediate the gender-PEB relationship     .

3) Comparing our used version of the NEP and an alternative version of the 2-MEV scales by their direct effects on pro-environmental behaviour in our model.

In Hungary, the nationwide Sustainability Thematic Week (STW) has been announced by the Ministry responsible for education yearly since 2016, with a linked research program since 2020. In 2022, PontVelem Ltd., the organiser of the STW, initiated international research to investigate environmental awareness based on representative samples in three central European countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia). A total of (n=) 3434 responses of Hungarian students of this representative sample were included in the presented analysis. The average of their age was (M=) 16.89 years (SD=0.64; Med=17). The gender ratio was unbalanced, with boys in the majority (boys: 52.6%; girls: 47.4%). The research program in 2023 was organised under the ethical permission (2023/379) of the Research Ethics Committee of ELTE University Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology. The data were collected using the questionnaire software of Forsense Institute and analysed with SPSS 28.0 statistic software and the PROCESS macro v4.2 of Hayes (2013). The following scales were included in the analyses: NEP (New Environmental Paradigm scale, Berze et al., 2022) – The NEP is one of the most used scales (Hawcroft & Milfort, 2010) to measure environmental attitudes. Our used version is based on the revised NEP's Scale for Children (Manoli et al., 2007), which has been translated into Hungarian and used on multiple occasions. During our exploratory factor analysis, we found the scale to consist of three factors – the same factor structure found by Berze and his colleagues (2022). We also used their established factor names: Rights of Nature, Eco-Crisis, and Questioning of Human Intervention. 2-MEV (Two Main Environmental Values Scale, Bogner and Wiseman, 1999) – the 2-MEV is also a prominent and widely used measurement of environmental attitudes, while also psychometrically better than the NEP. A version based on a Czech adaptation of the scale (Činčera et al., 2022) was applied, which has not been examined by exploratory factor analysis yet, thus, our results are the first in this context. We found satisfactory psychometric metrics and three factors: Utilisation, Preservation and Enjoyment of Nature. PEB (Pro-Environmental Behaviour Scale) – this measurement is an amalgamation of items from different scales made by expert researchers of environmentalism. Our methodology of analysis was a mediated linear regression model. Gender as the independent variable, the PEB score as the dependent variable, and the factors of the NEP and 2-MEV as mediators were included in the model.

The complete interpretation of our findings is still in process. However, our preliminary findings are the following. A significant direct association was found between students' gender (boys were coded as „1" and girls as „2") and their pro-environmental behaviour (β= -0.18, p<0.001). Since a significant total indirect (β=0.26, [95% CI: 0.212, 0.311]) and total association (β=0.08, p=0.02), both with opposite signs compared to the direct effect, were also found between gender and PEB, the mediation in our model is partial and inconsistent. This means, that environmental attitudes partially mediate the effect of gender on pro-environmental behaviour, i.e., other factors also have a role in the gender-PEB relationship besides the attitudes. Considering the opposite signs of direct and indirect effects in our mediation model, it might be argued that if their environmental attitudes are controlled, girls behave less pro-environmentally than boys and it is associated with the factor(s) not revealed, i.e., girls' stronger environmental attitudes outweigh this/these factor(s) resulting in more pro-environmental behaviour by them compared to boys. We found significant direct effects between two out of three NEP factors (Rights of the Nature: β=0.02, p=0.34; Eco-Crisis: β=0.07, p<0.001; Questioning of Human Intervention: β=-0.06, p<0.001) three out of three 2-MEV factors (Preservation: β=0.45, p<0.001; Utilisation: β=0.10, p<0.001; Enjoyment of Nature: β=0.19, p<0.001) and the dependent variable. Stronger associations of PEB were found with the 2-MEV Scale than the NEP Scale. It could allude to the possibility that using 2-MEV to measure environmental attitudes might lay results that can be better integrated into the overarching models of pro-environmental behaviours.

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