Behavior-based environmental attitude: Development of an instrument for adolescents

Due to the omnipresent attitude–behavior gap, conservation psychologists have ceased to believe that attitudes are traceable from people's behavioral records. In contrast to this conventional wisdom and to the current state of the art in attitude measurement, we developed a behavior-based attitude scale for adolescents, which is based on people's recall of their past behavior. Using a cross-sectional survey of 928 students, we found that people's environmental attitude can be reliably derived from self-reported conservation behaviors by employing Rasch-type models. Our new attitude measure substantially overlaps with two previously established, conventional environmental attitude scales. Technically, behavior-based environmental attitude represents as much an attitude measure as it does a measure for people's goal-directed conservation behavior.