An empirical study about sustainable consumption behavior of students in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

In recent years, people have witnessed a growth in environmental pollution and almost unsustainable human consumption patterns. To protect a green environment, shifting to sustainable consumption habits is crucial. However, Vietnamese students are said to still not be too aware of sustainable consumption in daily life. Consequently, finding the factors impacting Ho Chi Minh students’ intentions to consume sustainably is the primary goal of this research, and thus execute suitable actions as well as fill the gaps in the previous research by integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Theory of Consumption Value (TCV). Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are applied through interviews and online form surveys. Then, the PLS-SEM analysis method was applied to test the model and hypotheses. Based on a sample of 350 respondents, the analyst outcome environmental knowledge, functional and emotional consumption value has a positive influence on the attitude, except for sustainable perception. Both consumption trends and green communication influence positively on subjective norms. Finally, the effects of attitude, subjective norm, emotional consumption value, and PBC are statistically significant while functional consumption value does not affect the intention of consumers toward sustainable consumption. On the other hand, the theoretical and practical contributions to sustainable consumption and some limitations that future researchers need to cover in this research are also discussed