Examining the Measurement and Validity of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale and Its Short Forms.

Adolescents growing up in the 21st century face multiple global challenges, including climate change (Crone et al. ; UNICEF ). Compared to older generations, today's adolescents will be disproportionally impacted by the consequences of climate change, including heatwaves, floods, and droughts (Thiery et al. ). The rapid hormonal, cognitive, and social developments during the adolescent period may especially motivate adolescents to take action for societal change (Crone et al. ). Indeed, adolescents have played a central role in the worldwide climate movement: in recent years, millions of adolescents have joined school strikes to demand climate action from governments and industries (de Moor et al. ; Wahlström et al. ). Adolescents' climate activism can be understood as a collective act of solidarity, particularly with young people from future generations and from vulnerable geographical regions (i.e., the Global South; Thomaes ). What psychological drivers may underlie adolescents' decisions to join school strikes and other forms of climate action? The current study addresses this question. Through semi‐structured interviews, we explore how climate activism may be understood by considering adolescents' developing identity and developmentally salient motivations. In so doing, we offer a novel developmental science perspective on adolescent climate activism. We define climate activism as engagement in public or collective behaviors (i.e., participation in a protest, demonstration, or action for an environmental cause, or active involvement in an environmental organization) to advocate for social or political change (Clayton and Parnes ). Climate activism can be understood as one form of civic engagement (defined as prosocial and political contributions to society; Buchmann ; Wray‐Lake and Shubert ) and as a manifestation of positive risk‐taking behavior (i.e., constructive behavior that entails risk; Duell and Steinberg , ). A budding literature sheds light on young people's motivations for and perspectives on climate activism using interview and survey methods (for an overview, see Neas et al.  and Romano et al. ). This work shows that young people are more likely to engage in climate activism when they identify with others who do so, perceive their friends to be doing so, and when they experience a sense of efficacy (Brügger et al. ; de Moor et al. ; Haugestad et al. ; Wahlström et al. ; Wallis and Loy ). Additionally, these studies show that young people are more likely to engage in climate activism when they are concerned about the climate crisis and feel a responsibility or even an obligation to take action (Brügger et al. ; Haugestad et al. ; Wallis and Loy ). Yet this work does not typically distinguish adolescents from young adults, studying young people up to around 30 years old conjointly. Adolescence is a developmental period that starts with the onset of puberty and ends with the transition to adult social roles (Crone and Fuligni ; Fuligni ; Sawyer et al. ). Here, we focus on middle to late adolescence (Sawyer et al. ), during which prosocial behavior peaks and risk‐taking behavior sharply increases (Blankenstein et al. ). Adolescents may experience fewer opportunities to contribute to societal challenges like the climate crisis (e.g., not having the right to vote): For another challenge, the Covid‐19 pandemic, adolescents reported experiencing fewer opportunities to valuably contribute than young adults (te Brinke et al. ). Also, adolescents are not necessarily motivated to engage in climate activism in the same way as their adult counterparts.