Correlation Between Attitude and Environmental Behavior in Nursing Students of a Public University in Peru

Environmental attitudes and behaviour play a vital role in developing a responsible and environmentally sustainable culture. Objective: To determine the relationship between attitudes and environmental behavior in nursing students of a public uni-versity in Peru. Material and Methods: Non-experimental, quantitative, correla-tional and prospective study, population made up of 450, sample of 207 students, using as instrument 2 nationally validated questionnaires, adapted to our reality, applying a pilot test to 15% of the sample, reporting the Cronbach's alpha coeffi-cient of (0.784) and (0.873), (attitudes and behavior), respectively. Results: The age group of 20-24 years (46.2%), and female sex (79.7%) predominated, X ̅=20.56 SD = 2.875, the second cycle was 19.3%. The descriptive results show that the environ-mental attitudes of the students are predominantly characterized by an "unfavora-ble" attitude (52.7%), when analyzing by dimensions, it is observed that the cogni-tive attitude is favorable (75.8%), the behavioral and affective attitude is unfavora-ble (79.2%) and (61.4%) respectively. The environmental behavior of students is predominantly evaluated as "good" (55.1%), "fair" behavior (42.5%), and "poor" be-havior (2.4%). Conclusion: Pearson's correlation analysis revealed a moderately and statistically significant positive relationship between environmental attitudes and environmental behavior in students of the Peruvian public university (r = 0.469, p < 0.001). This result indicates that, as students' environmental attitudes be-come more favorable, their environmental behavior also tends to improve.