52 chapter 2 Table 2.14. Partial Correlation Between Transilience and Relevant Outcomes when Controlling for Efficacy Beliefs and General Resilience in Study 4 Controlling for selfefficacy Controlling for outcome efficacy Controlling for resilience 1. Individual intentions .02 .05 2. Individual behaviours .04 .08* 3. Collective intentions -.02 -.01 4. Well-being .12*** .17*** .11** 2.6. GENERAL DISCUSSION In this paper we introduced the construct of transilience, defined as people’s perceived capacity to persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of climate change risks. We proposed that transilience can be an important construct for advancing our understanding of climate change adaptation, as it acknowledges that people’s perceptions may not only regard ways to reduce and avoid the harm of climate change, but also ways to exploit beneficial opportunities. We first developed a set of items that align with our definition of the three components of transilience (i.e., persistence, adaptability, transformability), and selected the most appropriate items based on experts’ assessments of their face validity and quality. Next, we conducted four questionnaire studies to test the validity of the climate change transilience scale. Confirmatory factor analyses generally showed that the items captured well the three components of transilience, particularly after we improved the persistence items based on Study 1, although we found one minor cross-loading in the last study. We further found consistent evidence that the transilience scale, though three-dimensional, reflects a single construct, and that the scale shows high reliability. Further, we found that people, on average, score above the midpoint of the scale, which suggests that they perceive they can be transilient in the face of climate change risks. The four studies provided support for the scale’s concurrent and discriminant validity (see overview in Table 2.15). Higher perceived transilience was associated in the expected direction with theoretically related constructs, such as more positive affect towards climate change, higher self-efficacy and outcome efficacy, and higher general resilience. Moreover, as expected, higher transilience was not associated to lower climate change risk perceptions, except for the last study, although the relationship was very weak. Transilience was also either positively or not significantly related to negative affect towards climate change, except for the last study, where we found it associated to a slightly lower climate change anxiety (in an exploratory analysis). Importantly,
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