Climate Change Beliefs and Attitudes Measure: a preliminary psychometric study in a Portuguese community sample

Introduction Climate change beliefs influence people’s behaviours such as the adoption of pro-environmental actions, therefore it is crucial to effectively measure them. We developed a short measure (Climate Change Beliefs and Attitudes Measure/CC-BAM), comprising 4 items whose content was adapted from previous studies, namely Loram et al. (2019)’s 8 item climate change denial measure. To the best of our knowledge, there is no instrument that validly assesses these beliefs in the general Portuguese population. Objectives To analyse the psychometric properties of the preliminary Portuguese version of the CC-BAM. Methods Item content validity was guaranteed by 7 experts. 599 Portuguese adults (mean age=34.40±16.18) answered to the Portuguese preliminary version of CC-BAM (4 items) and to the validated instruments: Climate Change Distress and Impairment Scale/CC-DIS and Pro-environmental behaviour scale/PEBS. Item 1 (“Do you believe in climate change?”) had three possible options of answer: a) “No”, b) “Yes, I believe they are a natural phenomenon” or c) “Yes, I believe they are caused by human activity”. Items 2 (“How convinced are you of your previous answer?”) and 3 (“Do you think climate change is a serious problem?”) were answered on a Likert scale from 0 (“Not much”) to 4 (“Very much”). Item 4 (“How often do you think about climate change?”) was answered on a Likert scale from 0 (“Never”) to 4 (“All the time”). SPSS 29 was used to perform Exploratory Factor Analysis/EFA, descriptive statistics and inferential analysis. Results EFA revealed a 1-factor solution with an explained variance of 55.90% confirmed by parallel analysis. Cronbach’s alpha was of .704 (lower if any item excluded) and all items had a corrected item-total correlation >.20. All items correlated with each other (from r=.27 to r=.59) and with the total score (from r=.63 to r=.85, all p<.01). CC-BAM correlated with CC-DIS (r=.51) and PEBS (r=.49, both p<.01). Women had significantly higher mean scores in all items and total CC-BAM. Age correlated with CC-BAM total score (r=.12) and with item 4 (r=.35, all p<.01). 86.5% of participants (n=518) answered to item 1 with option c) (group 1); 12.5% (n=75) answered b) (group 2) and 1% (n=6) responded a) (group 3). Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that those 3 groups significantly differed in mean/median scores of items 2, 3 and 4 and of CC-DIS and PEBS. Conclusions The preliminary version of CC-BAM shows adequate psychometric properties, however more studies are needed. Although caution must be taken in the interpretation of this preliminary results, this study provides a novel, internally consistent and short (easily implementable) measure of climate change beliefs. Disclosure of Interest None Declared