Adaptation and psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Pro-Environmental Behaviours Scale (PEBS)
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Adaptation and psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Pro‑Environmental Behaviours Scale (PEBS) Elisa Menardo1 · Margherita Brondino1 · Margherita Pasini1 Received: 5 November 2018 / Accepted: 11 November 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Given that human behaviour is a major cause of environmental problems, psychology can play a crucial role in the efforts to deal with environmental issues. Environmentally significant behaviours (EBs) are defined as behaviours that harm the (natural) environment as little as possible or that contribute to its protection. However, psychologists often assess behaviours that are the target of interest without knowing their influence on the ecological system. The Pro-Environmental Behaviours Scale (PEBS; Markle in Hum Ecol 41:905–914, 2013) is, to our knowledge, the only scale based on empirical evidence from environmental scientific studies that covers the principal EBs categories proposed in the literature (private-sphere environmentalist, activism, and nonactivist behaviours in the public sphere). The aim of this paper is to adapt the original PEBS to the Italian context (qualitative phase) and to verify its psychometric properties (e.g. factor structure) (quantitative phase). The original scale was slightly modified following a suggestion obtained in a focus group (n = 17) and in a pilot study (n = 18). On a sample of 765 Italian adults [70% female, mean (SD) age = 41.7 (12.2), 2 missing] results revealed a 4-factor structure (conservation, environmental citizenship, food, and transportation) of the Italian PEBS, like the original version (Markle 2013), maintaining 15 of the 19 original items (CFI = .973; 2 = 170.63, p .01 and a ΔRMSEA value > .015 indicate a deterioration of fit model (Cheung and Rensvold 2002). Multigroup CFA (R package “semTools”; Jorgensen 2016) was used to investigate measurement invariance. We sequentially tested the invariance of the model constraining
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a higher number of parameters to be invariant across gender (female, male), educational level (high school of lower, university degree, post-university education), and place of residence (northeast of Italy, northwest, centre, and south Italy) subgroups. Following literature guidelines (Vandenberg and Lance 2000), we tested configural (equal pattern of factor loading), metric (equal factor loading), and scalar (equal intercepts) invariance in this order. For each invariance test we evaluated the goodness of fit with the same indices used for CFA. Comparisons between invariance tests were made using the fit indices used for comparison of alternative models. Despite Cronbach’s alpha coefficient being the most popular internal coherence measure, many authors (e.g. Dunn et al. 2014; Zinbarg et al. 2006) disapprove its usage and encourage the use of other measures of reliability, especially with multidimensional scales (Raykov 1998; Raykov and Shrout 2002; Zinbarg et al. 2006). Since the PEBS is a multidimensional scale, we used ω coefficient for categorical
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