An Analysis of Research Trends in Environmental Behavior Using Text-Mining: Focusing on the Field of Education in Korea

This study aimed to systematically analyze the research trends on environmental behavior in the field of education in Korea and to explore future research directions. Data were collected from the Research Information Sharing Service (RISS) using the keyword “environmental behavior” and the subject category “education,” resulting in a final selection of 113 papers. For text-mining analysis, the TEXTOM program was employed to conduct frequency analysis, network analysis, CONCOR analysis, and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The main findings are as follows. First, the keyword with the highest degree and betweenness centrality in the network analysis was “environmental attitude,” indicating that the relationship between environmental behavior and environmental attitude has been the most frequently studied topic. Second, in the CONCOR analysis, Cluster 1 included environmental behavior, environmental attitude, environmental consciousness, elementary students, and environmental sensitivity, which represent major themes in domestic research on environmental behavior. Third, the LDA topic modeling identified three main topics: Topic 1, “environmental behavior and related variables”; Topic 2, “environmental consciousness and consumer behavior”; and Topic 3, “development and evaluation of environmental education programs.” Fourth, elementary students appeared as the most frequent research subjects (130 cases), indicating a heavy concentration of research on this group. Based on these findings, it is suggested that future studies should further explore and apply theoretical models of environmental behavior, expand the scope of research to include climate crisis response and energy transition behaviors, and diversify research subjects beyond elementary school students to encompass different school levels and generations. This study is significant in that it systematically presents the trends and characteristics of environmental behavior research in the educational context, thereby providing a basis for future research directions.