Designing, Testing, and Validating an Attitudinal Survey on an Environmental Topic A Groundwater Pollution Survey Instrument for Secondary School Students

摘要

Since Rensis Likert introduced his method for measuring attitudes in 1932, survey instruments have been developed to obtain information about a wide range of subjects (1-10). Measurement of student attitudes regarding the environment is one important example of the application of Likert-based survey instruments (11-15). Noteworthy examples include scales for measuring environmental attitudes to a specific problem, such as the Children's Attitudes Toward the Environment Scale (CATES) to assess the attitudes of school children towards water consumption (16), or attitudes of a specific group, such as the Environmental Attitudes of the University Scale (EAU) suggested for university students (17). Water pollution is one of the most urgent environmental problems (18). However, the measurement of attitudes toward groundwater pollution has not been much explored, despite the fact that pollution is a basic subject for determining environmental behavior (19). As Stern suggests (20), environmental attitudes should be measured in relation to specific subjects that optimize the prediction of particular behavior.