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

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.