Characterizing the Energy-Saving Behaviors, Attitudes and Awareness of University Students in Macau

Abstract

Currently, energy and its usage are the primary environmental issues in all countries and regions. As a special social group, university students not only have extremely high energy consumption needs, but they have more advanced consumption concepts. Understanding their energy-saving characteristics could provide foresight for predicting the energy-saving characteristics of future residents. Using data collected from 737 valid questionnaires, from five typical universities in Macau, this study investigated university students' energy-saving behaviors, attitudes and awareness, and analyzed the possible influencing factors. The results showed that the energy-saving behaviors and attitudes of respondents from five university were nearly the same. Meanwhile, 75.98% of the respondents clearly recognized that energy-savings behaviors are closely related to their daily study and life, and 96.61% of the university students thought that it is very necessary to save energy. In addition, 92.94% of students thought it was necessary to carry out energy-saving education in universities. The regression analysis indicated that “the relationship between energy-saving awareness and daily life” and “the necessity of energy-saving education” are positively correlated with the energy-saving awareness at the significance level of 1%, whereas the energy-saving behaviors, “give priority to energy-saving products” and “shut down your computer when going out”, are positively correlated with energy-saving awareness at the significance level of 10% and 5%, respectively. Finally, we proposed effective suggestions for raising the awareness of saving energy among university students.