The Future of Education

Sustainable Development (SD) is an important concept of the modern era whose accomplishment poses major challenges to policy-makers worldwide. The holistic and complex nature of SD which is most usually thought as being deployed in three main dimensions (environmental, social and economic) and at the same time is expressed in both the cognitive and attitudinal/behavioural domains, poses severe difficulties with regard to the empirical evaluation of people’s perceptions related to it. The Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ) is a recently developed and empirically validated instrument among Swedish young adults (18-19 years old) which aims at evaluating sustainability literacy by taking into account the holistic nature of SD via investigation of people’s cognitive and affective views of the concept¹. In the current work, the SCQ was adapted in the Greek language and subsequently its reliability and structure were evaluated by statistical analysis of the responses provided by 631 adults serving in the Greek public sector. The Greek version of the instrument (SCQ-GR) showed an overall excellent reliability by maintaining all 50 items of the original instrument (Cronbach’s α = 0.970). Factor analysis after applying Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization led to the extraction of four main components (with individual Cronbach’s α values ranging between 0.807 and 0.974) which account in total for 65.84% of the whole sample variability. Detailed examination of the individual items of each component led to the following assignments regarding the nature of the assessment provided by the SCQ-GR: Component 1 is comprised of 23 items which refer collectively to “attitudes and behaviour” towards SD. Component 2 is comprised of 18 items which refer to “knowledge” regarding SD. Component 3 is comprised of 4 items which refer to “social-environmental activism”, and finally Component 4 is comprised of the remaining 5 items which refer to the feeling of “detachment” from the notion of sustainability. The good psychometric qualities of SCQ-GR provide strong evidence for the valid use of the instrument for assessing sustainability literacy among adults of a wide age range withing the Greek cultural context.