Improving Attitudinal Frameworks to Predict Behaviors in Human-Wildlife Conflicts.

The goal of this study was to improve the understanding of the attitude-behavior relationship in the context of wildlife management, specifically an urban human-wildlife conflict scenario. A survey was used to explore the attitude-behavior relationship of a university community, in response to proposals to manage the campus's squirrel population. The data suggest that beliefs and attitudes modified by variables shown to increase accessibility correspond better to behavioral intentions than unmodified attitudes and beliefs. The data also suggest that the inclusion of a measure of previous behavior shows a strong relationship to behavioral intentions and will increase the predictive ability of models within different theoretical frameworks, including the theory of reasoned action. Most importantly, for the advancement of a comprehensive theoretical framework, this study illustrates how composite models combining components of the theory of reasoned action and attitude to behavioral process models outperformed other models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]