Validation of a German Survey Instrument on the Stages of Change of the Transtheoretical Model in Students of Higher Education

Targeted climate education can help to encourage people to act sustainably in the long term, thus helping to overcome the climate crisis. This study validated a Ger-man-language questionnaire, based on the Transtheoretical Model (TTM), to assess five discrete stages of behavior change (pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance). For this purpose, the Climate Change Stages of Change Questionnaire (CCSOCQ) by Inman et al. (2022) was translated into German and tested on a sample of 731 students of higher education in Germany. The results showed that the translated CCSOCQ has sufficient psychometric properties and empirically maps the five stages of the TTM. The German version of the CCSOCQ proved to be a reliable and valid instrument for measuring change processes in students' sustainable behavior and confirms that the TTM is a valuable model for measuring sustainability-related behavior change. This offers the opportunity to develop interventions based on this, which address the needs of the re-spective person and thus actively promote behavior change.