Factors affecting the purchase intention of green products among state university students in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Unsustainable business activities have led to many environmental issues worldwide. Thus, customers must pay their attention toward these environmental concerns. Since the green concept is an emerging concept to reduce environmental impact created by organizations, its adoption is compulsory. Thus, researching in this area is a contemporary requirement contributing to both industry and academia. Although much research has been done in behavioral contexts, less number of studies has been completed considering purchase intention toward green products. Also, the empirical literature emphasized the necessity of investigating further evidence in purchase intentions toward green products. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate in this area. The university students being young customers and responsible for tomorrow as educated people who can easily transfer the knowledge to the society, this study selected university students in Sri Lanka as the population hence; the sample decided using the Morgan table was 200 considering the annual intake to the universities in Sri Lanka. They were selected according to the convenient sampling technique. A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify the variables for the study using most recent studies in this area. Amongst, purchase intention toward green products was selected as the dependent variable while environmental attitudes, product attributes, social influence, personal experience, and environmental knowledge were identified as independent variables. Accordingly, the necessary hypotheses were derived. Then, primary data were collected from the university students in Sri Lanka using a survey-based questionnaire and received a 60% of a response rate. The analysis was continued with quantitative techniques using the statistical software IBM SPSS 25. Accordingly, the statistical tests related to normality, reliability, and validity were done hence; they were proved in the collected data. Then, the correlation analysis showed significant relationships between the dependent variable and each independent variable. But, further analyzing data, the regression model showed positive and significant relationships of purchase intention toward green products with only environmental knowledge and product attributes while environmental attitudes, personal experience, and social influence were insignificant in the Sri Lankan context. These findings could be confirmed with the evidence of past studies in this area. Based on these findings, the study suggested appropriate strategies that can be adopted by the university students to improve purchase intentions toward green products. Further, necessary future investigations were presented as future insights.