Composite Respect for Animals Scale

AbstractA valid and convenient method to measure nonhuman animal attitudes contributes to feasible survey studies and the evaluation of educational programs. There are established scales for measuring animal attitudes but only some have acceptable psychometric properties: others address only a small fraction of the constructs, and some are overly long. We therefore aimed to develop a short, practicable measurement of animal attitudes that contains the constructs developed previously. Two studies were conducted: in the first one, 127 items were subjected to an exploratory factor analysis, which extracted 51 items in 10 factors. The scale was reduced to 20 items retaining all of the initial constructs with 13 positive and 7 negative items, which were subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis in study 2. Correlations with personality, meat consumption, age, and gender provide evidence for validity. We suggest using this short, unidimensional Composite Respect for Animals Scale covering a broad construct.