Sustainability consciousness and well-being: Results from an Italian survey

The concept of sustainable development is more and more pervasive in today’s society and there is now a general consensus that it is an attempt to bring about global change by striking a balance between economic prosperity, social progress and environmental protection. Many indices have been defined to measure the sustainability of a system and to guide policy actions towards sustainability, however measures needed to assess the degree of public awareness of the full meaning and importance of sustainability are very few. The first psychometric instrument developed to measure the individuals’ sustainability consciousness is represented by the Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ), recently developed by Gericke et al. (2019). This questionnaire collects information about people’s attitudes, knowledge and behaviour in the economic, social and environmental domains and, thus, it allows to construct latent variables that help to see in detail how strongly and in what form respondents’ sustainability consciousness is expressed. The questionnaire was written in English and designed for Swedish people, thus a validation is necessary to use it in other countries and cultures. The authors of the present contribution validated (in a previous work just submitted) the Italian version of the SCQ on a sample of Italian people collected before the Covid-19 outbreak. In this contribution, we aim at testing the robustness of the validated version of the Italian SCQ using a sample of data collected after the first lockdown. Moreover, in the light of the recent literature concerning the association between subjective well-being and some aspects of sustainability consciousness (mainly related to the environmental dimension; Ojala, 2013; Su´arez-Varela et al., 2016) we enrich the original questionnaire adding a section devoted to the measurement of the self-perceived well-being, in order to investigate whether and to what extent the sustainability consciousness is affected by the subjective well-being. For these aims, we implement a structural equation model that accounts for the relations among observed items and latent constructs and among latent constructs.