The Study of Environmental Identities in Iranian Society: A Field Study

It seems that today's human environmental identity, which is itself threatened, also threatens the environment. Environmental identity is all kinds of methods that people use to justify and interpret their relationship to the earth as manifested in their personality, values, actions, and feelings. The aim of the present study is to assess the environmental identity in Iranian society among university students based on the Susan Clayton Environmental Identity Questionnaire. This questionnaire, in a way, measures the opinions, views, feelings, sense of belonging to the environment and people's experiences of the environment in a wide range and dimensions. Identifying the environmental identity in any society will be the first step in planning to enhance the environmental identity of individuals and, consequently, change behavior towards the environment to prevent its destruction.

Using Morgan’s Table and Convenience Sampling, in this quantative research, 280 freshman and postgraduate students in English language and literature at Hakim Sabzevari University of Sabzevar, Lorestan University, Khayyam University of Mashhad, Islamic Azad University, Torbat Heydarieh Branch and the Tabaran Institute of Higher Education of Mashhad were asked to answer Susan Clayton's Environmental Identity questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of 24 questions that students answered in 40 minutes. Data were entered into SPSS software. To analyze the data, the independent samples t-test, and one-way ANOVA were used, and the views of the two groups were compared.

Findings showed that education and age of people had no effect on their attitude towards the environment and their environmental identity, but their gender had an effect on their attitude towards the environment and, consequently, their environmental identity.

It may claim that when planning for an environmental protection program, the gender of people should be considered as a significant variable because the gender of individuals has an impact on formation of their environmental identity. Although the variables of age and education in this study did not show significant differences in the environmental identity of the participants, this does not mean that they should be ignored in environmental planning.