A study on developing a general attitude scale about environmental issues for students in different grade levels

The aim of this study is to develop a general attitude scale about environmental issues (GASE) for students in different grade levels. The research was carried out with the total 1225 students; 409 (33.4%) were primary school students in grades 5, 6, 7 and 8; 408 (33.3%) of the students were in grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 at high schools and the remaining 408 (33.3%) students were undergraduates at a university in Artvin. The study consists of five parts including a literature review, item pool, experts’ opinions, administration of scale and computing the reliability and validity. While constituting the pool of items, 21 students in different levels were asked to write a composition related to the environment and environmental issues. A pool of 46 items has been performed, which are directly concerned with the subject of attitude or accepted to be interested in, from the collected compositions. These were edited to 36 items by the opinion of the experts and the five point Likert draft scale. The draft scale was administered to 1,225 students and as a result of factor analysis, the number of items was reduced to 27. The Cronbach-Alpha internal integrity coefficient of the final version of the scale was found to be 0.88 after factor analysis was carried out. After computing the reliability of GASE, the scale is ready to be used.