Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses of an Environmental Attitude Scale (EAS) for Turkish University Students

Abstract

The authors developed a 4-dimensional Environmental Attitude Scale (EAS) on a sample of 639 university students in Turkey. Forty-seven attitude statements from the pool of 172 items were given to 192 students. Items from the four different dimensions resulted from a principal component analysis with a varimax rotation. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the scale measures 4-dimensional traits, such as attitudes toward population growth, environmental problems, nuclear energy, and energy conservation. Differences in the factor structures between the present study and studies conducted in Western countries may reflect cultural differences.