French adaptation and validation of the Climate Anxiety Scale

The notion of climate anxiety—i.e., anxiety associated with perceptions about climate change—has gained traction in the last couple of years. Clayton & Karazia (2020) recently developed the 22-item Climate Change Anxiety Scale that measures climate change anxiety. They also examined the factorial structure of their newly developed scale and reported that a four-factor structure (i.e., cognitive and emotional impairments related; functional impairments; personal experience; behavioral engagement) best fitted their data. In this preregistered study (https://osf.io/5pnvu), we aimed at developing a French adaptation of the scale and validating it in a French-speaking community sample (n = 305). Although our confirmatory factor analyses replicated the four-factor model implied by Clayton & Karazia (2020), our results also pointed to unidimensional factor-structure as a plausible and simpler alternative—though statistically sound—model. Moreover, both the four-factor and unidimensional approach to the French version of the scale yield good metric properties, including internal reliability and divergent validity. In this presentation, we will also discuss the implication of a four-factor versus unidimensional approach to climate anxiety.