Development and validation of a youth climate anxiety scale for the Youth Development Instrument survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emerging terms in the literature such as climate anxiety describe heightened concern, fear, and anxiety related to the climate crisis. Recent efforts have attempted to develop and validate scales to measure climate anxiety; however, extant research is largely focused on adults. Consequently, it is unclear whether developed measures are appropriate for adolescent populations, despite disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis experienced by this age group. The purpose of this study was two-fold; first, we aimed to assess levels of climate concern among Canadian adolescents using the Youth Development Instrument (YDI), a population-level youth well-being survey administered in schools with students (ages 15-18). Secondly, we collaborated with adolescents to adapt an existing climate anxiety scale to be included in the YDI survey. We used survey results to validate the adapted scale for use with adolescents and assessed levels of climate anxiety within our sample. In consultation with adolescents, the 13-item Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CCAS) was adapted to create the Climate Change Anxiety Scale - Short-form (CCAS-S) which consists of four-items adapted from the original CCAS. A total of 2306 respondents were included in analyses. Most adolescents reported feeling climate change concern (75.8%). A smaller proportion reported experiences of climate anxiety (48.7%). Confirmatory factor analysis supported a one-factor structure for the CCAS-S, with high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.95) and good model fit with error co-variance. Findings from this study provide construct validity evidence and reliability for the use of the CCAS-S in adolescent populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".