Author(s): Songyu Jiang, Ruihui Pu
The study aims to investigate the perspectives that contributed to explaining the college students' sustainable consumption behavior in the online education industry (SCBOEI) and empirically build up with frameworks up lighting college students' drivers to consume sustainably and greenly in the online education industry. This research employs an exploratory design using a qualitative approach, with a semi-structured in-depth interview was conducted with 25 college students from different majors, ages and colleges in Chongqing city. The researcher is both a recorder and an observer. The data are coded by using NVivo 12.0 version software. The findings show that value, identity, environmental attitude, and contextual factors are critical dimensions to explain college students' SCBOEI. Value, identity, and contextual factors are the core explanatory factors, while environmental attitude is the sub-core explanatory dimension. However, the second level of coding shows that functional value, emotional value, self-identity, environmental attitude, government action, and social media have strong explanatory power. In addition, this study finds that covid-19 plays a prominent explanatory role in SCBOEI. Furthermore, learning conditions and psychological value can explain college students' SCBOEI to some extent. Such findings were encapsulated to building up with one theoretical framework pertinent and explain to SCBOEI. This paper contributes to existing theory as it provides evidence for the drivers of college students’ SCBOEI, it also tentatively answers the question of inferring a difference in consumers’ sustainable consumption. Finally, it studies sustainable consumption from perspectives of the online education industry for college students. to some extent, this study also promotes and extends the sustainable development goals (No.4 Higher Education and No.12 Consumption).