Categorización de los niveles de conciencia ecológica en los millennials de la ciudad de Cuenca y su incidencia en el comportamiento de compra aplicado a productos verdes

Abstract

This study looks for determining the ecological awareness levels, the relationship with the consumption of eco-friendly products and establishing consumer groups according to those levels. This is applied on the millennials of Cuenca city. This research is structured through a cross-sectional survey. This one is applied on 200 young people from Cuenca between 20 and 36 years old. Ecological awareness levels are measured through scalar assessments. It is based on three dimensions: cognitive, affective, and conative. It allows to obtain a global measure of the variable and permits to categorize it in four levels, through cut-off points. To determine the relationship between levels of ecological interest and the consumption of eco-friendly products, the chi-square statistic and the Pearson’s correlation coefficient are applied. For classifying the people in consumer groups according to their level of ecology, a clustering technique is used. It also allows determining differences among groups. The evidence indicates that the ecological awareness levels of the study group are: high, medium, low and without ecological awareness. High ecological awareness levels have a positive relationship with the consumption of eco-friendly products, which is reflected on a bigger purchasing effort to acquire them. In cluster analysis, three groups of consumers are identified: eco-active, eco-passive and non-ecological. The variable which shows significant difference between groups is the education level.