Children’s engagement with environmental issues

ABSTRACT

This research offers insights into children’s engagement with the environment by exploring whether and how children demonstrate individual and collective engagement with environmental issues. Using a child-centered methodological approach based on individual interviews and drawings, this research shows that children express different levels of engagement with environmental issues, such that they demonstrate varying levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement. Our findings show evidence that individual (i.e. knowledge, interest and sustained attention, perceived responsibility, and behavioral control), as well as socio-contextual factors (communication within the family setting and outside, processes of (re)socialisation) foster or constrain children’s motivational states toward environmental issues. We conceptualize our findings to show children’s embodied engagement with environmental issues. From these findings, we provide managerial implications addressed to managers and policymakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Engagement
• children
• environmental issues
• socialisation
• family

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie Schill

Marie Schill is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Reims Champagne Ardenne, France. Her research interests focus on family daily consumption practices and sustainable development. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Marketing, Ecological Economics, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Consumer Marketing, the European Management Journal, and European Journal of Marketing.

Isabelle Muratore is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Toulon, France. Her research laboratory is the CERGAM. Her research interests focus on children’s socialization, and children and environmental issues. Her publications have appeared, for instance, in the Journal of Business Research, the International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, the Journal of Consumer Marketing.

Isabelle Muratore

Isabelle Muratore is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Toulon, France. Her research laboratory is the CERGAM. Her research interests focus on children’s socialization, and children and environmental issues. Her publications have appeared, for instance, in the Journal of Business Research, the International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, the Journal of Consumer Marketing.

Margaret K. Hogg

Margaret K. Hogg is Emeritus Professor of Consumer Behaviour and Marketing at Lancaster University. Her research examines the relationship between identity, self and consumption. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, the European Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Advertising and The Sociological Review. She is a co-author of the textbook: Consumer Behaviour: A European Perspective 7th ed. (Pearson, 2019).