40 research outputs found
A more fine-grained measure towards animal welfare: a study with regards to gender differences in Spanish students
The environmental issue is nowadays taking more importance in the environmental awareness all around the world, and in this field, animal consideration is more and more spread. A highlighted part in globalisation is the animal welfare awareness. This article presents a study comparing attitudes towards animals among secondary and university students in reference to gender. It was carried out on 1394 Spanish participants from 11 to 26Â years. The instrument used in the study is the reviewed version of the Animal Welfare Attitude Scale which was renamed as âAnimal Welfare Attitude-Revised Scaleâ (AWA-R Scale), with a Cronbach a reliability value of 0.85. It is subdivided into four components namely C1: animal abuse for pleasure or due to ignorance; C2: leisure with animals; C3: farm animals; and C4: animal abandonment. These components have been deeply detailed by a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), which highly contributes to define the position of participants for the different dimensions of animal welfare. It is concluded that significant differences exist between malesâ and femalesâ attitudes in all components of the AWA-R Scale. It is also suggested that two social characteristicsâpeopleâs attitudes towards animals and towards environmental protectionâare, at the very least, coexistent and may indeed be interdependent. These differences between gender in matters of socialisation could thus be reflected in environmental attitudes, and also in others related to them, i.e. animal welfare attitudes