Suchergebnisse

This study explores whether young people's propensity to take responsibility for the environment - and, consequently, to make pro-environment consumption choices - is negatively affected by living in a condition of social exclusion, such that of NEETs (i.e., Not in Education, Employment or Training). By adopting a mix of comparative methods, we used the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs-QCA) to compare European countries to find which configurations of types of NEET can be associated with different levels of perceived individual environmental responsibility. In addition, we implemented a mediation model by using Generalized Structural Equation Modeling (GSEM) estimation, to find whether the association between the NEET condition and the level of perceived environmental responsibility is mediated by individual happiness - as a proxy of social exclusion's consequences on the individual's well-being. Fs-QCA results are integrated at the micro level to test context-related variation. Data come from the 2016 European Social Survey, the 2016 Eurofound report, and the 2018 Italian Youth Report. We found that the presence of more vulnerable NEETs is associated with lower levels of perceived environmental responsibility. At the micro level, only in some countries does the condition of NEET lead to attribute environmental responsibility to the institutions, rather than to the single individual, and it seems related to a general lower well-being.

Traditionally, research on job insecurity (JI) has focused on organizational consequences and employees' psychophysical well-being. However, some recent studies explored potential extraorganizational outcomes of JI in relation to consumption and major life decisions. The present study, drawing on Conservation of Resource Theory, overcomes the limits of previous works by examining the effects of changes in JI through a simulation experiment design. Using a sequence of two different scenarios, 377 participants were asked to evaluate their JI and their inclination towards daily consumption and some major life decisions. Findings confirm that changes in JI affect such extraorganizational outcomes. It is also suggested that an improvement in job security leads to an increase in both consumption and major life decisions, which – in absolute values – is higher compared to the decrease that follows a reduction of job security.