The Relationships between Adolescents’ Climate Anxiety, Efficacy Beliefs, Group Dynamics, and Pro-Environmental Behavioral Intentions after a Group-Based Environmental Education Intervention

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

I appreciate reading your paper relevant to the current scientific debate on climate change and its effects on adolescents. It relies on school-based interventions (Climathons) that involve students actively dealing with climate change issues. The evaluation is based on the data analysis collected through different instruments that give different perspectives on the topic, even if a pre-intervention assessment is missing. This should be considered and argued in depth as a research limit. There are some limitations in the operationalisations of some constructs; then, it could be interesting to detail more on the results coming from the qualitative data collection. 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Our responses to both reviewers' comments are in the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall, this manuscript speaks to an important issue—the relationship between climate anxiety and pro-environmental behavior in youth. It has potentially interesting finds. Yet, there are serious flaws with the methods and analysis that need to be addressed. As is, it is difficult to assess the potential contribution of this paper, given the serious questions about the analysis. There are also parts of the Introduction that need to be clarified.

 

Introduction

-        P. 2, Lines 62-67: This information is unclear. What does “efficient” mean? What does group-based environmental education have to do with all of the information in the preceding lines? This seems like important justification for the study, but it is difficult to understand. What does it mean that group-based interventions do not “have more impacts in general”?

-        P. 5, lines 200-205. This information needs clarifying. Specifically, “no feature of the interventions significantly moderated the overall effect on the outcomes under study: group work (vs. not), experience with nature (vs. not), classroom-based intervention (vs. note), multiple sessions (vs. single), etc.” This sentence makes it very difficult to distinguish what potentially moderating variables and outcome variables you are studying, as compared to prior work. This needs to be absolutely clear. You’re not studying the variables you list there…where do they come from? What outcome variables are you referring to?

-        P. 5 Lines 207-218: There is a lot of information here, and it is unclear how it relates to the above information. This needs to be better organized.

-        P. 6 line 219. Authors need to define “group-based environmental education”. How is this different than “normal” environmental education?

 

Analysis & Findings

-        The authors describe 3 sources of data: questionnaire, observations, teacher interviews. There are problems with all of these.

o   The questionnaire includes only a small number of items (in some cases only one) per construct (e.g. climate anxiety). And, these are not validated measures drawn from prior research. The authors need to make clear how they derived these and why we should trust them as used in a statistical model. Many of the items seem vague, and I am skeptical of their use in a model. Additionally, there is no analysis of the open-ended item described.

o   The observations—criteria used is vague, and it is unclear how the authors turned observations into validated quantitative data. No analytic process is described in depth. They talk about “scores” but do not show how these are calculated or what research basis they have. The authors provide alphas for these measures but it is unclear how they calculated them.

o   Interviews—there is no analysis described. There are rigorous ways of analyzing qualitative data like this, and the authors do not seem to do this, but just use quotes when it is helpful. They need a more thorough analysis and documentation of this analysis.

-        The analytic strategy is described in the Results. This should come earlier in the Methods.

-        I am skeptical of the path model the authors developed, given the issues with the questionnaire measures, on which the model is based. None of the questionnaire items seem to be validated, so those items should not be used as scores within a path model, unless that model can account for categorical variables (which unvalidated questionnaire items would be).

-        The results of the multilevel regressions are unclear. The authors should create tables with variables used in the regressions. I am also skeptical of these because they seem to incorporate scores from observations (issues described above).

-        Findings describing the teacher interviews need to be more rigorously analyzed and described.

Author Response

Our responses to both reviewers' comments are in the attached document.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, the manuscript is now improved and I recommend for the publication, after the Editor decision. 

Author Response

Thanks a lot for reviewing our paper!

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors seriously improved this manuscript. It is much stronger in its current form. There are still a few issues:

- There is still causal language in the title, abstract, and in some places in the manuscript, when causality cannot be assessed through the measures used by the authors. They did not measure the "impact" of an intervention. This absolutely needs to be addressed.

- The authors added some detail about "group-based environmental education", but there should be more theoretical justification and ties to the literature about why group-based EE might support certain goals. 

- Related, the observational measurement of groups taken by the research, while better explained, seems questionable, particularly since it was measured only once during the study. There are also not significant relationships with this variable. The authors do a better job explaining and contextualizing this variable and finding, but it still seems odd. 

- the authors should discuss limitations of the study in a deeper way, as well as implications. Related to limitations, the authors state: "Our results showed clear direct and indirect links between participants’ subjective experience of working in groups and their willingness to act more for the environment..." I think the authors should address that these findings likely have little to do with the intervention itself and more to do with the particular young people they studied. There are many other variables likely to be moderating both subjective experience of working in groups and willingness to act for the environment (e.g. worldview). 

Author Response

Thanks a lot for reviewing our paper!

There is still causal language in the title, abstract, and in some places in the manuscript, when causality cannot be assessed through the measures used by the authors. They did not measure the "impact" of an intervention. This absolutely needs to be addressed.
Thanks for the comment. Causal language has been removed in the abstract, in the hypotheses and in the discussion and replaced with sentences that highlight the correlational relationships between the constructs of interest. Note there is still some causal language in the introduction, for instance when we describe experimental studies on the impact of efficacy beliefs.

The authors added some detail about "group-based environmental education", but there should be more theoretical justification and ties to the literature about why group-based EE might support certain goals. 
We now provide more detailed information (l.259-268).

Related, the observational measurement of groups taken by the research, while better explained, seems questionable, particularly since it was measured only once during the study. There are also not significant relationships with this variable. The authors do a better job explaining and contextualizing this variable and finding, but it still seems odd. 
We now describe in more details how we came up with the measureswe used and acknowledge its exploratory side in the discussion. Group dynamics were measured only during Climathon Day because group work was mostly done on that day. Multiple measurements were however taken throughout the day.  

The authors should discuss limitations of the study in a deeper way, as well as implications. Related to limitations, the authors state: "Our results showed clear direct and indirect links between participants’ subjective experience of working in groups and their willingness to act more for the environment..." I think the authors should address that these findings likely have little to do with the intervention itself and more to do with the particular young people they studied. There are many other variables likely to be moderating both subjective experience of working in groups and willingness to act for the environment (e.g. worldview). 
We have added a Limitations section.