Development and Validation of an Instrument for Assessing Climate Change Knowledge and Perceptions: The Climate Stewardship Survey (CSS)

Year 2013, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 57 - 73, 14.01.2013

Scott Walker Karen Mcneal

Abstract

The Climate Stewardship Survey (CSS) was developed to measure knowledge and perceptions of global climate change, while also considering information sources that respondents ‘trust.’ The CSS was drafted using a three-stage approach: development of salient scales, writing individual items, and field testing and analyses. Construct validity and alpha-level reliability was conducted on the 122-item test instrument to produce a refined 84-item CSS.  The field tested CSS includes five scales (1) Impacts of Climate Change, (2) Causes of Climate Change  (3) Misunderstandings about Climate Change  (4) Issues  and (5) Policy.  Four knowledge dimension sub-scales and seven perception dimension sub-scales scales are included in the accepted instrument. The CSS is particularly applicable to studies interested in measuring potential respondent’s ideas on the impacts, causes, and misunderstandings that are important to global climate change knowledge and perceptions as they relate specifically toward climate change issues and policy.

Keywords

Climate stewardship survey, CSS, climate change knowledge and perceptions

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• SourceT 71 .724 Role 72 Role 73 Role 74 Role 75 Role 76 EnvQual 77 EnvQual 78 EnvQual 79 Priority 80 Priority 81 Priority 82 Priority 83 Priority 84
• % Variance 14.28 14.21 7.40 4.84 4.39 4.39 4.05 3.71 3.28 2.88 2.71
• N=122; Principal component extraction; Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization. Factor loadings smaller
• than 0.45 have been omitted. Sub-scales with poor reliability have been omitted.