Intention to Recycle Mobile Phones: Gender Comparison

This paper aims at providing a better understanding in the propensity of university students torecycling their mobile phones and comparing males and females in this regard. Despite many studiesthat have discussed the students' habits for this purpose, very few have studied deeply the differencesbetween genders. Among the many potentially relevant differences, namely incentives and deterrents,knowledge and awareness are included. This study used a cross-sectional design to portrait the actualsituation with a questionnaire distributed widely across university administrators in Turkey whorelayed it to their students. A total of 772 answers were received from 74 universities. Thequestionnaire was built around the past behavior and its reasons, the intention to recycle and itsmotives. After eliminating improper respondents from the sample, several analyses were conductedwith SPSS, namely intensive descriptive statistics and a series of t-tests and Xi2 to test gender effect onmost of the questions. As can be expected, the data analysis has showed differences in the reasonsinvoked to change their devices and less expectation of a financial counterpart to decide on a disposalmode. Female students are less inclined to keep their old phones as a memento; instead, they planmore for a safe disposal or a potential re-use, which shows a possible reason why they attribute lessvalue than males to their old devices. Surprisingly, female students have less knowledge about e-wastethan male students, but they are far more concerned about environment.