How to measure environmental concern: an IRT evaluation and advancement of established survey scales

Measuring environmental concern is central to environmental public opinion research, yet the field lacks a comprehensive and consistent approach. Existing measures are limited by a lack of theoretical consensus, scarce validation, outdated wording, and, limited precision at the upper end of the scale. We address these limitations by developing and validating a refined measure, defining environmental concern as people’s affective, cognitive, and conative positions toward human-induced problems and their willingness to solve them. Using Item Response Theory on a large, representative Swiss sample (N = 7932), we assess 36 established survey questions to identify validated items with high measurement quality that reflect our theoretical interest. We select the best-performing items and validate their power to predict pro-environmental behavior and policy support. We propose a new, precise combination of established survey items that significantly improves measurement at high levels of environmental concern and offer practical recommendations for survey researchers.