Uncovering sustainability awareness profiles in higher education: A person-centered approach

Sustainability awareness is generally treated as a single level to be raised, yet its components can vary independently of one another. This exploratory study identified subgroups of undergraduate students whose awareness follows distinct patterns and examined how those subgroups relate to demographic characteristics. Data were collected through an online survey from 597 undergraduate students across five faculties, on five dimensions covering personal knowledge and efficacy, educational experience, individual practices and engagement, institutional perception, and global concerns and ethics. The five-dimension structure was supported by exploratory structural equation modeling, with a scaled Chi-square of 268.02 on 185 degrees of freedom, CFI = .991 and RMSEA = .027, and scalar measurement invariance held across gender, age group, faculty, academic year and level of first exposure for the specifications tested. Latent profile analysis, estimated from multiple starting values after the default initialization was found to return to a local optimum, identified four profiles: moderate awareness (37.7%), high comprehensive awareness (36.7%), low practices and engagement (13.2%), and low personal knowledge (12.4%). Profile membership showed no association of practical size with any demographic variable, and effects of medium size were excluded by equivalence testing. Sustainability awareness is therefore distributed in qualitatively distinct patterns that do not follow conventional demographic lines. Because items were administered in a fixed order within visually separated blocks, construct and presentation format are confounded, and both the instrument and the profile structure require independent replication with randomized item order before they can be regarded as established.