Abstract
<p>Currently, overconsumption resources are accelerating climate change and driving ecological degradation, therefore reducing consumption levels has become a critical need and a global challenge. In response, several lifestyles that aim to reduce consumption have emerged, one of the most important being material voluntary simplicity, understood as the voluntary reduction of consumption because of specific personal, social or environmental concerns. However, existing scales mix consumption patterns with preferences, values and attitudes, leaving aside such specific concerns that motivate the adoption of a voluntary simplistic lifestyle. This has several implications, including the difficulty of differentiating this lifestyle from other types of anticonsumption (e.g., frugalism or minimalism). Through three studies (Ntotal = 854), this research aims to solve this limitation, developing a scale that focuses on non-material motives (such as social, personal and environmental reasons) that precede voluntary simplicity in order to investigate more deeply the subsequent consequences of this lifestyle. The first two studies were used to perform exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and to test evidence of convergent and divergent validity. The third study replicates the results in the general population. The results showed a scale with high internal consistency to measure the non-material reasons underlying the adoption of a voluntary simplistic lifestyle. NMVRC Scale was positively related to sustainable consumption, frugalism, and minimalism, but the correlations were not high, providing evidence of the distinctions between these constructs. This scale is a step forward in building a body of research that allows studying both the antecedents and the effects of voluntary simplicity on consumption.Keywords: Voluntary simplicity, Consumption Behavior, Minimalism, Materialism, Psychometric properties</p>