Instruments

The Climate Change Attitude Survey is composed of 15 Likert-type attitudinal items selected to measure students’ beliefs and intentions toward the environment with a focus on climate change. This paper describes the development of the instrument and psychometric performance characteristics including reliability and validity. Data were gathered from 1576 middle school students from across the United States in 2014 to validate the instrument and establish the measurement properties of the instrument’s scales. Factor analysis revealed two stable constructs representing beliefs and intentions, which were reconfirmed through multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis techniques. Internal consistency reliability was found to be respectable for the survey as a whole as well as the two separate scales. The Climate Change Attitude Survey was created to fill a void in the measurement of middle school students’ affective responses to the environment and climate change. Educators may find this survey useful for assessing pre- to post intervention attitude changes as well as for identifying differences in selected groups of students. Further development is targeted to include adding new constructs as well as testing the instrument with different population subgroups.