Development and validation of climate change awareness scale for high school students

The topic of climate change has begun to be referred to as the global climate change crisis. Despite the precautions taken through international accords, the main solution to climate change will be an increase in individual knowledge and awareness, as well as change in their behavior as a result. A valid and reliable climate change awareness (CCA) scale for high school students was developed in this study. As a scale development strategy, an inductive scale development approach was used. The study enrolled a total of 454 high school students. In this study, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to provide validity. In this way, the CCA scale was developed and validated using two different randomly separated samples. Sample 1 (274 high school students) was assigned to the exploratory factor analysis group, while sample 2 (180 high school students) was utilized to confirm the factor structures via confirmative factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to check model-data coherence and test assumptions about variable relationships. As a result of the study, a valid and reliable Likert-type scale for assessing high school students’ climate change awareness was developed. The scale consists of 17 items and a Cronbach alpha value of 0.88. CFI (0.93), NFI (0.82), RFI (0.88) and GFI (0.90) RMSEA (0.045) have proven to be acceptable fit indexes between the model and the data for the research model. Thus, the fit indexes produced as a result of the CFA indicated that the model had good fit.