The Causal Mechanisms of Environmentally Responsible Behaviors Using Value Orientations and Recreation Specialization

Abstract

With human activities a major cause of environmental problems, there has been an increasing interest in understanding individuals’ environmentally responsible behavior (ERB). Numerous variables such as value orientations and recreation specialization are known to affect the process of fostering specific and general ERB. However, understanding underlying causal relationships is not easy due to the nature of causal inference using observational data. This study attempts to clarify causal mechanisms to explain the process of individuals’ engagement in general ERB from value orientations and recreation specialization via site- and activity-specific ERB using the directed acyclic graph (DAG) theory. The data came from recreational boaters registered in Michigan. Results showed that an initially constructed causal path model was considerably revised using the DAG, and subsequently structural equation modeling analysis was conducted to examine the causal relationships of the revised model. Diverse managerial and policy-related implications are discussed.

Keywords:

• Causal relationships
• Directed Acyclic Graph
• environmentally responsible behavior
• recreation specialization
• value orientations

Acknowledgments

We appreciate Jenni Lee and Dan O’Keefe for collecting the data as well as AE and anonymous reviewers for constructive review comments. This study was partially supported under the project titled ?Marine ecosystem-based analysis and decision-making support system development for marine spatial planning? by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, Korea (grant number 20170325). This work was also partially supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A5B8914028).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.