Climate Change Hope Scale (CCHS)

Background

This survey was developed by Christine Li at University of Missouri and Martha Monroe at University of Florida. It was designed to understand an individual’s degree of hope/hopelessness with respect to climate change. The survey was developed in three phases that included pilot testing with high school students, review from a panel of experts in related fields, and a final selection of items and final testing. 

Format

This survey consists of 11 statements to which people respond to on an 8-point scale. The scale goes from -3 (strongly disagree) to 0 (neutral) to 3 (strongly agree) and one last choice of X which means “I do not think climate is changing”

Audience

High school students

When and how to use the tool

This tool is a quantitative approach to explore climate change hopefulness. It can also be used as a pre-post survey to see whether a program increased hopefulness.

How to analyze

We recommend entering survey responses into a spreadsheet using a program such as Microsoft Excel. Create a spreadsheet with 11 columns for the 11 statements and a row for each participant. Assign each participant’s survey a record number, and enter their responses across the corresponding row. Using a -3 to 3 point scale, enter the equivalent value ( -3 for “strongly disagree” to 0 for “neutral” to 3 for “strongly agree”). Enter a dot if the response was skipped or and X if an X was indicated. Pull out the responses with an X for separate analysis. 

You can create an average score for each individual by adding all of their responses and dividing by the number of questions answered. Do not include skipped questions for which you entered a dot. The average will be between -3 and 3. 

When administering the pre-experience survey and post-experience surveys, you can conduct higher-level statistics on your data to understand if participants had significant changes in the outcome areas after their participation in the program.

What to do next 

Once you’ve administered your survey and analyzed the data, consider the following suggestions about what to do next: 

• What do the data say? Is the pre-test score significantly different from the post-test score? Use Excel to compare the numbers. 
• Invite program staff or other partners to look over the data. Consider questions together, like 
• Why did we get these results?
• What do these results tell us about our programming?
• What can we do to increase hope, such as providing examples of people making a difference, or engaging learners in action projects?  
• Are we satisfied with these results? Do  these data support our hopefulness goals? Are the stakeholders satisfied with the results?
• Are there differences in how learners express hopefulness? Do these differences vary by experiences, race, gender, age? How could we adapt our program to help all learners increase their sense of hope? 

How to see if this tool would work with your program

To assess whether the tool is appropriate for your audience, please review the items carefully and pilot test the tool with a small group that represents your population. To pilot test, ask a small group of willing participants who are part of your target audience to talk to you as they complete the tool. What are they thinking when they read each item? What experiences come to mind when they respond? As long as this is what you expect and you will gain relevant information from your evaluation, you are on the right track! If the answers are different for each person, and they should be more similar given their experiences, you may need to look at other tools. If the problems are minor, and limited to changing a few words to make them simpler or more relevant, you could revise the language in the tool. Be sure respondents understand what you mean by global warming and climate change.

Tool tips

• The tool should be used in its entirety, we do not recommend changing this tool.