Portuguese Validation of the Climate Change Attitude Survey: Psychometric Properties and Relations with Positive Youth Development

ABSTRACT

Promoting positive development may lead to young people’s active contributions to their environment through positive attitudes and behaviours. The Climate Change Attitude Survey (15-item version) aims to identify climate change attitudes differences in groups of students and to assess pre- to post-intervention attitude changes. We intended to validate and test a possible extension of this scale among a Portuguese sample of adolescents and emerging adults. We also investigated whether higher scores on this scale would be positively associated with positive youth development. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance, and convergent validity were assessed. The results showed good psychometric properties aligned with the original factorial structure. Significant differences were found among female and male samples regarding beliefs and intentions. A small but significant positive association was identified with a positive youth development scale. We suggest this may be an adequate instrument to assess youth climate change beliefs and intentions.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate Change Attitude Survey
• adolescents and emerging adults
• factor analysis
• measurement invariance
• positive youth development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), School of Psychology, University of Minho, supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the Portuguese State Budget (UIDB/PSI/01662/2020), and under a Ph.D. fellowship also supported by FCT (SFRH/BD/143814/2019).