Development and Validation of Eco-anxiety Scale in Pakistan

This study was aimed to develop and validate an Eco-anxiety scale for Pakistani population. It is studied that Eco-anxiety is a recent phenomenon that gained much attention among environmental researchers. Eco-anxiety refers to feelings of fear, dread and worrying about the impacts of climate change. The study was carried out in 2 stages, in phase 1, after careful focus group discussions and expert opinion, an enriched item pool was generated. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted on a sample of 252 including both males and female. EFA established a four factor structure including behavioral symptoms, ruminations, anxiety symptoms and personal impact on environment. 29 items with four factors were extracted on the basis of Principal Component Analysis, scree plot and eigenvalues. Confirmatory factor analysis was assessed on a purposive and independent sample of 314 participants across the Punjab to validate the four-dimensional structure resulting into excellent model fit indices. The findings are supported by previous scales as they have four factor structure of scales. This scale provides an indigenous tool to measure Eco-anxiety in Pakistani culture, facilitating the assessment of the said phenomena. This study paved the way for future researches on Eco-anxiety to gain insight about this novel phenomena contributing to the complexities of environmental changes.