{"title":"The decoupling of socioeconomic status, postmaterialism, and environmental concern in an unequal world: a cross-national intercohort analysis","authors":"Yan Wang","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae168","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"There has been an intense yet inconclusive debate over the impacts of socioeconomic status (SES) and postmaterialism on environmental concern. Recent years have seen a growing interest in addressing the controversy by exploring the conditioning effect of social context. Previous studies of inequality argue that it unevenly exposes people to environmental degradation, reduces social cooperation, and erodes egalitarian values. This study integrates the two lines of research by linking social inequality to environmental sustainability and examines the extent to which inequality shapes the impact of SES and postmaterialism on environmental concern in the cross-national intercohort context. Analyses of multiple waves of the World Values Survey data using the hierarchical age-period-cohort modeling techniques suggest that contextual inequality substantially attenuates the effects of SES and postmaterialism. This relationship is consistent across countries with different economic development levels and more pronounced in older cohorts. The current study illustrates the importance of careful consideration of social conditions, the unequal distribution of income in particular, when examining predictors of environmental concern, and sheds light on the theorization of a more inclusive, balanced human-nature relationship.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Forces","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae168","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
There has been an intense yet inconclusive debate over the impacts of socioeconomic status (SES) and postmaterialism on environmental concern. Recent years have seen a growing interest in addressing the controversy by exploring the conditioning effect of social context. Previous studies of inequality argue that it unevenly exposes people to environmental degradation, reduces social cooperation, and erodes egalitarian values. This study integrates the two lines of research by linking social inequality to environmental sustainability and examines the extent to which inequality shapes the impact of SES and postmaterialism on environmental concern in the cross-national intercohort context. Analyses of multiple waves of the World Values Survey data using the hierarchical age-period-cohort modeling techniques suggest that contextual inequality substantially attenuates the effects of SES and postmaterialism. This relationship is consistent across countries with different economic development levels and more pronounced in older cohorts. The current study illustrates the importance of careful consideration of social conditions, the unequal distribution of income in particular, when examining predictors of environmental concern, and sheds light on the theorization of a more inclusive, balanced human-nature relationship.
期刊介绍:
Established in 1922, Social Forces is recognized as a global leader among social research journals. Social Forces publishes articles of interest to a general social science audience and emphasizes cutting-edge sociological inquiry as well as explores realms the discipline shares with psychology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Social Forces is published by Oxford University Press in partnership with the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.