Abstract

Objectives: The reseach is conducted to evaluate the environmental consciousness of the students in a medical faculty in Ankara.
Materials and Methods: Of the 412 students, 342 (83.0%) participated this cross-sectional study. Data were collected in August 2000 with ?Environmental Consciousness Research Form?, the questionnaire prepared by the researchers and analysed using EPI INFO 6.0, a statistical package programme.
Results: Mean age of the study group was 23.71 and 54.7% were male. Most of the students (74.4%) reported that they would go to school/work by bycle, bus or on foot, and 87.1 percent of them told they would prefer train. Of the participants, 72.3% think environmental problems are not the issues only governments would care about. While most of them (81.8%) reported that they would give up buying the products harmful to the environment, only 18.8% told they would want to deliver brochures about environment to each house. Nearly half of the students reported that they wouldn?t spend their money for the solution of environmental problems.
Most of the students reported that they didn?t admit to any official institution to get information on environmental pollution (90.3%), never attended a meeting on environment (85.6%) and never subscribed to a publication about the environment (91.4%).
The students knew the products containing mercury, the substances which do not dissepear in the ocean and about the ozone layer depletion.
Environmental consciousness scores are calculated by grading the questions about environmental consciousness. Mean score was 27.47. Nearly half of the students (53.2%) had a score over 28.
Students reported that deforestation (10.1%), air pollution (8.0%), population explosion (7.8%), nuclear weapons (7.3%) and industrial wastes (7.1%) would be the most important problems in 21. century.
Conclusion: Complementing the lack of knowledge determined in the study by planning educational programmes, considering the environmental issues cautiously, effectively and systematically and improving the researches about environmental consciousness should be the priorities.

Key words: Environmental consciousness,Medical faculty students

Article Language: Turkish English