Development and validation of Children’s Responsible Environmental Behavior Scale

Though environmentally responsible behavior (ERB) has been a focus of many studies in the field of environmental education, very few scales have been developed to assess children’s ERB. In this regard, this article focuses on the development and validation of Children’s Responsible Environmental Behavior Scale (CREBS) and also reports the psychometric properties of this scale. The items in the CREBS were developed initially from the responses to four open-ended items by 229 fourth and fifth grade students. This initial form was pilot tested with 673 fourth and fifth graders and then subjected to exploratory factor analysis. Later, the revised version of the scale was administrated to 2412 fifth graders, and those results were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. CREBS consists of 23 items measured using a seven-point Likert-type scale, which have been organized into four sub-scales: political action (six items, α = .92); eco-management (six items, α = .70); consumer and economic action (five items, α = .70); and Individual and Public Persuasion (six items, α = .80). Study results indicate that CREBS can be used for exploring the extent to which elementary school students in Turkey demonstrate four types of behavior to help prevent and resolve environmental problems and issues.