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Organic food consumption as an example of pro-environmental behavior: application of the theory of planned behavior
Urban, Jan ; Šubrt, Jiří (advisor) ; Smith, Michael Lee (referee) ; Buriánek, Jiří (referee)
This work has two objectives. At the empirical level, it seeks to investigate the role of attitudinal, normative and other factors influencing the intention of Czech consumers to purchase organic food, specifically by exploiting the theoretical framework of the theory of planned behavior. On a more theoretical level, this thesis seeks to extend the theory of planned behavior by including descriptive norms in its framework and subjecting such extended theory to an empirical test. The dissertation proceeds in seven chapters. The first three chapters are introductory in the sense that they discuss the motivation for the present work, provide definitions of organic food, and attempt to establish the link between the choice of organic food, as an example of individual pro-environmental behavior, on the one hand, and processes that lead to environmental degradation on the other. Chapter 4 introduces the theory of planned behavior, its assumptions and empirical applications in various domains, including organic food consumption. The empirical data from a small (N=253) yet country-representative survey of the general adult population are described in Chapter 5, together with the method of structural equation modeling that is primarily used to analyze them. In Chapter 6 we test four empirical models of...
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Children left behind: self-confidence of pupils in competitive environments
Federičová, Miroslava ; Pertold, Filip ; Smith, Michael
Early-tracking systems naturally divide many classes of 11 years old students into two groups:\nstudents preparing for exams to enter better schools and everyone else, who decide not to compete for selective schools. Utilizing TIMSS data and a follow-up study in the Czech Republic, which has an early-tracking system similar to other European states following the German model, we show that this environment has a detrimental effect on the self-confidence of pupils in mathematics who do not apply for selective schools but have peers in their classroom who do apply. In particular, we show that girls who do not apply for selective schools experience a 11% drop in confidence in mathematics if they have four applicants among classmates and this effect is even larger if the applicants are successful in the admission process. We focus on self-confidence in mathematics as an outcome variable because the literature suggests it is directly linked to pupils' motivation to study STEM fields as well as subsequent educational achievement. Our results suggest that the decrease in selfconfidence among girls is long lasting and implies that gender gaps in self-confidence can be a result of the competitive environment of the educational system.
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Self-confidence of a class and competition of the classmates for eight-year gymnasium
Federičová, Miroslava ; Pertold, Filip ; Smith, Michael
The Czech Republic belongs to a small group of European countries with an educational system that leads to a very early differentiation of pupils in schools according to their academic performance and socio-economic background. In the Czech Republic, 18% of pupils in the 5th grade apply for 8-year grammar schools (gymnasia in Czech) and go through the challenging process of preparing for entrance exams. Thus, on average 3 pupils in each classroom apply to these gymnasia, of which almost 2 pupils are admitted. Our analysis on data from a unique survey of schools shows that a presence of an extra classmate who is applying for gymnasia affects one’s self-confidence. The biggest negative impact we noted was in case of self-confidence of girls in mathematics. Decline in confidence (from the level in the fourth grade, that is before preparing for entrance exams) is about 7% of the student with at least two classmates who applied. As a control group, we use the class where no one has applied.
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