A Q-Methodological Approach to Capturing ESD-Related Beliefs in Primary Teacher Education: Instrument Development and Pilot Study

This article presents a Q-methodological approach to capturing the relational structure of teacher beliefs regarding education for sustainable development (ESD). It reports on the development and pilot testing of a Q-sample designed to assess the suitability of Q-methodology with a pilot sample of pre-service primary teachers. Research on ESD emphasizes the field’s normative complexity and conceptual ambiguity, which pose challenges for empirically investigating professional beliefs. Current approaches often conceptualize beliefs as isolated dimensions or thematically reconstructed individual constructions, which provides limited insight into their relational organization as structured configurations of meaning. The Q-sample was constructed through a structured selection from a hybrid concourse, drawing on international empirical studies, student reflections, and theory-derived statements. The Q-sample was administered via an online Q-sorting procedure using a forced quasi-normal distribution and analyzed using by-person factor analysis to examine structural differentiation and interpretability. The pilot study produced an interpretable two-factor solution, demonstrating the instrument’s ability to generate distinguishable belief configurations. Overall, the findings suggest that Q-methodology is a conceptually coherent and methodologically robust approach for capturing the relational structure of ESD-related belief configurations in teacher education research.