Attitude and willingness of biodiversity conservation in Chinese university students: Associated factors and the mediation of social support

students was done to check for performance of the instrument, and the results revealed ideal internal validity and test-retest reliability, with the Cronbach’s α for all modules ranged from 0.87 to 0.94, and the Pearson’s correlation coefficients were all above 0.85 (0.89–0.92). The study protocol was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of Southwest Forestry University. Written informed consents were obtained from all respondents prior to the survey. 2.3 Variables and definitions Attitude and willingness to practice biodiversity conservation. In the self-developed questionnaire, attitude of biodiversity conservation was measured by a single question stated as “How do you think the importance of biodiversity conservation to human’s life and work?”, with 5-point Likert style responses (not important, somewhat important, important, very important, extremely important); willingness to practice biodiversity conservation was reflected by another question stated as “At what extent you are willing to participate in biodi- versity conservation activities that around you?”, also with 5-point Likert responses (very much unwilling to, unwilling to, hard to say, willing to, very much willing to). Perceived social support. Considering that for university students, their major sources of social support are similar to junior or senior high school students, therefore we used the Chi- nese version of Child and Adolescent Social Support Scale (CASSS) to gauge perceived social support. The CASSS contains 40 questions which can be divided into 4 dimensions (10 ques-

tions for each dimension), measuring social support from parents, teachers, classmates, and close friends, respectively. Responses to every question in the CASSS are 5-point Likert style, measuring frequencies from “Never” to “Always” [15]. A higher combined score of the CASSS indicates higher level of perceived social support. Statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics together with suitable statistical tests were used to depict characteristics and compare differences between subgroups. Univariate and multivar- iate binary logistic regression models were used to explore associated factors of attitude and willingness to practice of biodiversity conservation. As attitude and willingness to practice were all ordinal variables originally, before performing analysis, we dichotomized them accordingly: for attitude, we intended to explore the associated factors of high-level perceived importance in biodiversity conservation, therefore the answers were recoded as “very impor- tant” (those who answered “very important” or “extremely important”) and “not very impor- tant” (those who answered otherwise); for willingness to practice, we intended to screen for associated factors of confirmative willingness in practicing biodiversity conservation, therefore the answers were recoded as “willing to” (those who answered “willing to” or “very much will- ing to”) and “not willing to” (those who answered otherwise). The hypothesized mediation of social support was analyzed using the path analysis. A series of subgroup analysis were further

performed to check for possible effect modification by key characteristics in the mediation of social support. All statistical analyses were executed using the R software (Version 4.2.2). Except for univariate logistic regression models, which adopted a comparatively loose criterion (p<0.10), the statistical significance for all the rest analyses was set as a two-tailed p value less than 0.05. 3 Results 3.1 General characteristics of study subjects After initial sampling procedure, we successfully recruited 1623 students, 148 of them were excluded because of invalid questionnaire (incomplete or illogical), therefore the final analysis was based on a total sample size of 1475, with a valid response rate of 90.88%. The general characteristics of the 1475 surveyed subjects were summarized in Table 1: male students PLOS ONE Attitude and willingness of bio-conservation in Chinese university students PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307510 July 19, 2024 3 / 9