Validity and Reliability of Data Regarding Adult Perceptions About Sustainable Development: The Case of Greek Civil Servants

Sustainable Development (SD) is a key concept of the modern era, presenting significant challenges for policymakers worldwide. Due to its holistic and complex nature, the empirical assessment of people’s perceptions about SD, as well as their dependence on different demographic variables such as gender, may become a difficult research task. This work first aimed at assessing the validity and reliability of data regarding adult perceptions about SD and subsequently at examining for gender differences by taking the case of Greek civil servants. Data collection was accomplished via the use of the Greek version of the Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ-GR), an instrument originally applied among Swedish young adults (18–19 years old). The sample consisted of 631 adults serving in the Greek public sector. The data showed excellent overall internal reliability by maintaining all 50 items of the original instrument. For testing data validity, the conduction of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) resulted in four main components, which collectively account for 69.41% of the total variance. Component 1, comprising 19 items, refers to “attitudes and behaviors” regarding SD. Component 2, comprising 18 items, refers to “beliefs” regarding SD. Component 3, comprising 8 items, pertains to “social-environmental activism” for SD. Finally, Component 4, comprising 5 items, refers to “attachment” to SD. The four components identified with EFA were used as input for conducting confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The performance of CFA resulted in a model exhibiting a good fit to the data, thus providing strong additional evidence for its validity. Subsequently, evidence for configural, metric, scalar, as well as strict measurement invariance was obtained, thus allowing for meaningful comparisons between genders. Females were shown to outperform males in all components (with Cohen’s d effect sizes ranging between 0.216 and 0.383) except for the component referring to social–environmental activism, for which no statistically significant gender difference was observed. The good psychometric qualities of SCQ-GR provide strong support for its use in obtaining valid assessments of perceptions regarding sustainable development and possible influencing variables (such as gender) among Greek civil servants and potentially other adult groups as well.