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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1347407
This article is part of the Research Topic Climate Change Challenge: Adaptation to Climate Change View all 13 articles

Better climate action through the right knowledge? Development and validation of a item-response-theory scale measuring climate effectiveness knowledge

Provisionally accepted
Clara E. Simon Clara E. Simon Martin J. Merten Martin J. Merten *
  • Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Knowledge about the relative environmental impact and climate-protective potential of different actions (effectiveness knowledge) is important for successful sustainable action. However, there is currently no scale for measuring effectiveness knowledge that meets psychometric quality criteria. We developed a new scale consisting of 16 ranking and choice tasks and tested it on a convenience sample of 278 people from Germany in an online study. The final scale version achieved a reliability of rel=.655. This is significantly higher than the reliability of .329 achieved by the established effectiveness knowledge scale by Roczen et al. (2014) in this sample. Inter-correlation of both scales was moderate to strong, but the new scale is able to explain 3% additional variance in high-impact pro-environmental behavior when controlling for environmental attitude, whereas the established scale is not explaining any additional variance, indicating incremental validity of our scale. We conclude that it is possible to use ranking tasks to measure effectiveness knowledge more reliably in a test-efficient way and provide a set of items which are usable in the contemporary German context.

    Keywords: Environmental behavior, environmental knowledge, Environmental impact, Effectiveness knowledge, scale development, Measurement

    Received: 30 Nov 2023; Accepted: 14 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Simon and Merten. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Martin J. Merten, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, 39106, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

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