An innovative analytical framework for energy consumption behavior: A study based on Beijing households

Residents' energy consumption behavior has significant impacts on the achievement of carbon reduction targets and the effectiveness of related policies. Up to now, there has not been a complete framework that can accommodate internal psychological factors and external environmental factors. Based on the Planned Behavior theory and Value-Belief-Norm theory, this paper has added economic factors, policy impact, and convenience of consumption as important external environmental factors into a proposed model; in addition, knowledge level, behavioral expectations, and consumption habits are incorporated as new internal psychological indexes to construct a expanded framework. The framework integrates both internal psychological and external environmental factors, enriching and deepening the psychological foundation of behavioral analysis. After performing outlier detection, confirmatory factor analysis, and other steps on samples obtained from a questionnaire survey, the results of the framework fitting data show that it has high explanatory power for residents' energy consumption behavior, which is significantly better than the existing models. Furthermore, the new critical path that determines Beijing residents' energy consumption behavior is obtained by using the framework. In summary, this paper presents theoretical and empirical foundations for designing and enhancing low-carbon policies.