4 - (SYM 14) Measuring Climate Change Distress in Adolescents: A Validation Study

Climate change poses a dire threat to well-being of youth worldwide. In addition to direct threats to health resulting from heat, drought, and natural disasters, scholars are beginning to recognize the effects of the climate crisis on adolescents’ mental health. Although there is preliminary evidence that distress related to climate change is increasing in adolescents, the literature is sparse. One reason for the dearth of findings is the lack of measures assessing climate change distress that have been validated in adolescents. The current study addressed this gap by testing a downward extension of the Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CCAS; Clayton & Karazsia, 2020), a well-validated adult-focused measure assessing emotions and behaviors related to climate change.  

Participants were 138 adolescents ages 13-17 from a midsize Midwestern city. Youth completed online measures, including the CCAS, brief measures of depression and anxiety symptoms, and demographic information. We conducted a pre-registered set of confirmatory factor analyses, testing 4-, 2- and 1-factor models. The original models fit poorly in this sample; none of the models reached the pre-registered fit criteria for interpretation.

We then conducted a series of exploratory factor analyses to further evaluate the CCAS. Results indicated that items that relied on metacognition (e.g., “I think, why can't I handle climate change better?”) loaded poorly and items that mixed emotional and behavioral content (e.g., “I feel guilty if I waste energy”) cross-loaded. Dropping items that loaded poorly and cross-loaded resulted in a three-factor model that fit the data adequately. The final three factors were: 1) cognitive-emotional and functional impairment; 2) experience with climate change; and 3) behavioral engagement. The CCAS impairment factor was positively associated with negative emotions about climate change, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms (rs >.50, ps< .01). Notably, youth who reported a stronger sense of nature as integrated into their identity also reported more behavioral engagement with climate change action, but not more impairment related to distress about climate change.

These findings indicate that adolescents’ experience of anxiety and distress about climate change does not directly mirror that of adults, although the CCAS may provide a foundation that could be adapted to create a developmental extension of the adult measure, allowing for longitudinal analyses examining stability and change in climate distress among youth.