Decision-making process related to climate change mitigation among married-couple households: A case study of Taiwan

Carbon dioxide emissions from households are substantial. Therefore, mitigating climate change requires household-level behavioral changes. However, mitigation behaviors have predominantly been examined at the individual level. Fewer studies have even addressed intrahousehold interactions that drive decision-making in relation to household climate change mitigation behaviors. Therefore, this study investigated the relative influence exerted by husbands and wives on the four-stage process of decision-making (i.e., problem initiation, information search and evaluation, final decisions, and practice) regarding household climate change mitigation behaviors. The sample comprised 152 married heterosexual couples living in Taipei City, Taiwan. The results revealed that the majority of surveyed couples employed joint decision-making throughout the four stages, and the percentage of joint decisions made gradually increased from problem initiation (61%) through to practice (82%). By contrast, the percentage of individual decisions gradually decreased from problem initiation (38%) through to practice (17%). Wives had considerably more influence than husbands across the four stages, and the dominance of wives in decision-making was related to wives’ characteristics such as educational attainment, gender roles, environmental attitudes, and self-efficacy, as well as husbands’ characteristics such as educational attainment and environmental attitudes. However, there was no difference between husbands and wives in the level of engagement in the three kinds of mitigation behaviors and four types of decision-making influences across the four stages. These results will help inform policies about communicating climate change information and promoting household mitigation activities to limit climate change.