Developing and evaluating a situated psychometric instrument for assessing climate anxiety: The SAM2 CAM

TL;DR

This study creates a tool to measure climate anxiety in specific situations, finding that anxiety levels vary widely depending on the context and related factors.

Contribution

The novel contribution is the development of a psychometric instrument to assess climate anxiety in specific situations and its validation in the UK context.

Findings

The climate anxiety measure showed high reliability and validity across situations.

Climate anxiety varied significantly depending on the situation and individual differences.

Thirteen related factors explained a median 75% of climate anxiety variance in individual regressions.

Abstract

Although increasing research examines climate anxiety, little is known about the situational factors related to it. To assess these factors, we developed and evaluated a situated psychometric instrument for assessing how much climate anxiety individuals recall experiencing in 31 situations where climate anxiety is likely (e.g., hearing about climate catastrophes on the news). Of interest was how climate anxiety is experienced in a country like the UK, where climate disasters are mostly heard about in the media and anticipated in the future, relative to countries where climate disasters are experienced directly and regularly. In an online survey (N = 303; 50.8% female), we investigated how much climate anxiety individuals recall experiencing in situations where climate anxiety is likely to occur, along with how much they recall experiencing 13 factors potentially related to climate anxiety (e.g., threat, violation, rumination). An individual measure of climate anxiety, averaged across situations, exhibited high reliability, construct validity and content validity. Climate anxiety varied widely across situations, with individuals further varying in how much climate anxiety they remembered experiencing in each situation. As predicted, the 13 situational factors tended to correlate significantly with climate anxiety across situations, explaining a median 75% of its variance in individual regressions.

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