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Are we measuring concern about global climate change correctly? Testing a novel measurement approach with the data from 28 countries

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to test the Campbell paradigm (Kaiser et al. 2010) as a novel theoretical framework for the measurement of concern about global climate change and to compare this measurement approach with conventional assessment of GCC concern which is based exclusively on evaluative rating of global climate change concern. Using survey data from 28 European countries (N = 27,919), we find that GCC concern can be inferred not just from evaluative statements related to GCC, as is done in conventional measures, but also from other types of attitude-relevant responses (such as self-reports of mitigation activities and evaluation of mitigation policies). In addition, we also find that even though Campbellian measure is related in a theoretically expected way to conventional evaluative scale of GCC concern, and both measures assess the same latent construct, the former measure can predict difficult mitigation activity whereas the evaluative scale fails in this test of criterion validity. The poor performance of the conventional evaluative measure of GCC concern is due to the relative easiness of evaluative items that makes this measure insensitive to higher levels of GCC concern.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by a grant from the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (grant No. TD03000282). The author would like to thank Michael A. Ranney and all members of his research group at UC Berkeley for their comments on earlier version of the manuscript, and Cliff McLenehan for his language support.

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  1. Department of Environmental Studies, Masaryk University, Jostova 10, Brno, 602 00, Czech Republic

    Jan Urban

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Correspondence to Jan Urban.

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Urban, J. Are we measuring concern about global climate change correctly? Testing a novel measurement approach with the data from 28 countries. Climatic Change 139, 397–411 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1812-0

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