Assessing environmental activism among young adults: development and validation of the YA-EAS scale

In response to the ongoing climate crisis (Hopkins, 2020), young adults have become a significant force advocating for environmental causes, engaging in a range of actions from moderate activities like sit-ins and marches to more extreme forms such as blocking traffic and symbolic artifact destruction (Arya & Henn, 2021). Understanding the extent of environmental activism among young adults is therefore crucial to channeling this passion. Although measures like the Environmental Action Scale (Alisat & Reimer, 2015) exist to assess environmental activism, many of these instruments primarily target general populations without specific consideration for young adults. Given the unique challenges this demographic faces regarding environmental issues, there is an urgent need to develop and validate measurement scales tailored explicitly to their context. This research aims to address this gap by introducing the Young Adults Environmental Activism Scale (YA-EAS), a comprehensive tool designed to measure environmental activism specifically among young adults (age 18-26). The YA-EAS aims to differentiate between extreme and non-extreme behaviors. In Study 1, an exploratory factor analysis involving 300 participants revealed a reliable scale with two factors: "extreme activism," representing engagement in radical actions, and "non-extreme activism," indicating moderate or conventional involvement in environmental causes. Additionally, to assess the scale's structural validity, participants evaluated the relevance of YA-EAS items to environmental activism and the perceived extremism of the mentioned behaviors. In Study 2, using a new sample of young adults (N=300), a confirmatory factor analysis validated the two factors identified in Study 1. Furthermore, correlations were examined between the two YA-EAS subscales and relevant variables to evaluate the scale's convergent and discriminant validity.