People's perceptions of climate change have been of great interest for understanding how people respond to climate change. Yet, studies differ greatly in how they assess climate change perceptions, which makes it difficult to compare and integrate findings. The aim of this paper is to develop and validate a scale to reliably measure people's climate change perceptions. We define climate change perceptions as people's perceptions of the reality and causes of climate change, and the perceived valence, spatial distance, and temporal distance of consequences of climate change. To measure these perceptions, an item pool was developed based on a literature search and expert review. The resulting scale was tested in three empirical studies conducted in the US and the Netherlands, which supported the factor structure; reliability; convergent, predictive, and discriminant validity; and measurement invariance of the scale. Implications for future research are discussed.

人们对气候变化的看法对于理解人们如何应对气候变化具有重要意义。然而，研究在如何评估气候变化感知方面存在很大差异，这使得比较和整合发现变得困难。本文的目的是开发和验证一个量表，以可靠地衡量人们对气候变化的看法。我们将气候变化感知定义为人们对气候变化的现实和原因的感知，以及气候变化后果的感知效价、空间距离和时间距离。为了衡量这些看法，基于文献搜索和专家审查开发了一个项目库。最终的量表在美国和荷兰进行的三项实证研究中进行了测试，这些研究支持了因子结构；可靠性; 收敛，预测和区分效度；和尺度的测量不变性。讨论了对未来研究的影响。