Applying social media to environmental education: is it more impactful than traditional media?

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to explore how social media help promote environmental education and pro-environmental behaviours by analysing how young adults access social media and traditional media to obtain environmental information differently, how environmental ideas are disseminated through social media and how people perceive and realise environmentalism. Design/methodology/approach This is a qualitative study based on a semi-structured interview with student participants. The questions used in the interview were developed by on the integrated waste reduction model by Nishio and Takeuchi (2005) and the enhanced model proposed by Ho et al. (2019). Findings The results indicate that young adults agree and accept that living environmentally friendly lifestyles is an important goal. Although they acquire environmental information from social media, they seldom share or interact with those social media posts. This behaviour implies that they are information receivers when dealing with such contents. Originality/value The finding of this study provides insight for stakeholders on how to promote related knowledge and encourage people to be “greener” more often and construct a friendlier atmosphere for fostering more in-depth environmental discussions on social media.

Editorial: 40th anniversary: contemporary library research

“…Green technology is also an important topic nowadays (Chung et al, 2020;Guleria and Kaur, 2021;Ho et al, 2022a,b). Soroya et al (2022)…”

Information-seeking behavior in the digital age: use by faculty members of the internet, scientific databases and social networks

“…According to Lee (2014), “The importance of social networks in consumer decision-making and the behavior of the research community is very high.” Therefore, faculty members and academic libraries need to pay special attention to social networks in scientific activities and course works. This point is pointed up by Chung et al (2020) as well. They suggested to curriculum developers and instructors to consider the usage of social media to augment classroom activities and discussions.…”

“…In addition, quantitative and survey studies have limitations that can be overcome through qualitative studies. Accordingly, it is highly suggested that future works examine the behavior of information seeking and faculty members' use of the internet, databases and online social networks, focusing on qualitative approach and methods, such as study of Chung et al (2020) and Williams et al (2019).…”

Relationships between research supervisors and students from coursework-based master’s degrees: information usage under social media

“…In this way, researchers can get more real first-hand information to support their own research. On the other hand, we are also interested in privacy-related issues (Hung et al , 2007) and applying social capital theories in education aids through social networks (Chung et al , 2020; Fong et al , 2020).…”