Page - 159 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

5) environmental attitude and attitude towards plastic fruit packaging, as well as, 6) sociodemographic characteristics (e.g. age, sex). Sections 2 and 5 are necessary to answer the research questions, whereby sections 1 and 6 are used to describe the results in more detail. The final version of the questionnaire was tested in a pre-test and consisted of 43 questions. The sample size of the online survey contains 999 respondents, who study at a Bavarian university and are 18 years or older. Furthermore, only attendees who answered the whole questionnaire were taken into account. One main part of the study is to better understand the knowledge regarding plastic fruit packaging. Therefore, the respondents were asked to estimate the functions of plastic fruit packaging, such as protection, transportability and hygiene (Jünemann & Schmidt 2000; Pfohl 2004). A five-point Likert-scale was used to assess the students’ estimations. The other main part of the study is to analyse the students’ environmental attitudes and attitudes towards plastic fruit packaging. The environmental attitude was recorded using the revised New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale by Dunlap et al. (2000) in the German language. The revised NEP-Scale is a multiple-item scale which is commonly used as a method to assess environmental attitude and has already been applied to several studies (Atav et al. 2015; Sudbury-Riley et al. 2014; Xue et al. 2016). Further, the attitude towards plastic fruit packaging was measured using a self- developed multiple-item scale. For the development process of this scale, relevant literature was consulted (Bovensiepen et al. 2015, 2018; Jeżewska-Zychowicz & Jeznach 2015; Naturschutzbund Deutschland e.V. 2015). The statements used were verified by experts (local grocery shop owners and food retailers), were tested with 24 respondents in a pre-test and were used to generate a multiple-item scale consisting of 10 items. A five-point Likert-scale was used to measure both, the NEP-Scale and the attitude towards plastic fruit packaging scale. Furthermore, a semantic differential was applied to measure the connotative meaning of plastics and bioplastics for fruit packaging. The connotations measured with a seven-level-rating scale were used to derive the attitude towards plastic fruit packaging. The polar adjectives were based on relevant literature (Foscht & Swoboda 2011; Plumb et al. 2013). Thus, the results of the self-developed multiple-item scale could be described in more detail using the semantic differential. Within this study, bioplastics have been defined as plastics made from renewable resources (Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe e.V. 2016). 4. Results The socio-demographic sample characteristics as well as the main grocery store for buying fruit of the respondents is shown in Table 1. The distribution of age resembles the structure of German students (Middendorff et al. 2017), while females are over-represented in the survey with 62,2 % because in Germany 48.2 % of students are female. (Statistisches Bundesamt 2016). Furthermore, the average age of the respondents (23.15 years) nearly equals the average age of German students which is 23.5 years (Statistisches Bundesamt 2017). Additionally, almost all respondents (80 %) purchase their fruit mainly in discounters and supermarkets. Only 6.3 % of the participants are not responsible for grocery shopping. 159