The Scale for Assessment of Public Participation Towards Renewable Energy (RE) Development in Malaysia: An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

There are still limited numbers of studies on existing measures of public participation towards RE development in Malaysia. The developments of the measurement for assessing public participation also seem to require some extent of revalidation. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the factor structure of public participation that measured by willingness to pay level and it determinants that influence the public willingness to pay. The items of this developed scale were derived from previous published quantitative study. Validity and reliability of the instruments were assessed with EFA. One hundred and seventy two public had participated in this study. Results from this exploratory study revealed that the originally validated form of every factor structure (Willingness to pay (WTP), Awareness on RE (ARE), Knowledge on RE (KRE), Willingness to adopt RE technology (WTA) and Attitude towards RE usage (AURE)) except for Environmental concern (EC) did not, perform as per previous literatures within this research context. Therefore, a total of 16-items revised in public participation toward RE measurement might be better suited for use within the selected population. However, all the revised factor structure of WTP, ARE, KRE, WTA, EC and AURE had a good reliability measured by the following Cronbach's Alpha, alpha(WTP) = 0.897, alpha(ARE) = 0.932, alpha(KRE) = 0.833, alpha(WTA) = 0.901, alpha(EC) = 0.914 and alpha(AURE) = 0.826. This information provides preliminary evidence that the public participation towards RE instrument is a reliable and a valid measure that can be used to provide the data regarding RE development in Malaysia. However, this study sample size maybe viewed as relatively small, thus, future study should cross validate the results by engaging larger sample size.