A SURVEY OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDES AND ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE AND ENERGY CONSUMPTION BEHAVIOR AMONG CITIZENS OF URMIA, WEST AZERBAIJAN, IRAN

Nowadays, the environmental issues and challenges, particularly "energy consumption behavior" has been the focus of attenti on for policy makers and scholars in the fields of sociology, environment st udy, management and so on. The change in the people's behavior towards the nat uralist dimensions can be considered as one of the ways to avoid the damage t o the environment and destruction of nature (Quimbita, 2005:1). Based on the theory of Reasoned Action of Fishbin and Ajzen (1975), it is assumed that the re is a systematic model between the people's approach towards a certain iss ue and the related behavior towards that issue. On the other hand, scholars in the field of environment study such as Borden and Schettino (1979), Schahn and Hol zer (1990), Kaiser et al (1999), and Bayard and Jolly (2006) believe that th ere is a relationship between environmental knowledge and significant environment al behavior. Considering the significance of the issues stated above, the pr esent article attempts to shed light on energy consumption behavior and its possib le correlation with environmental attitudes and environmental knowledge among the citizens of Urmia, West Azerbaijan, Iran. The research method i s survey and the main tool for collecting data was questionnaire. Dunlop's NEP scale was used for measuring environmental attitudes and Salehi's Items was empl oyed for measuring environmental knowledge. Statistical sample was con sisting of 383 citizens who were selected using cluster sampling method. The re sults show: 1) the participants owned positive environmental attitude, 2) there was a statistically significant relationship between the environmental attitude and environmental behavior (energy consumption) of the participants, and 3) th ere was not any statistically significant relationships between environmental kno wledge – either systematic knowledge or behavioral knowledge – and environment al behavior of the participants