Dear Lala, you probably work on the border of economics and political science. I understand that you are more empirical person, but anyway theory is also important. (By the way, my PhD in economics is from UPF).

The issue of energy security is a complex question even in economics. It has several components, and even country's perception of energy security may be not objective. Geopolitics plays an important role here. I may recommend you to have a look at my IAEE article and presentation:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274633860_European_Gas_Supply_Security_and_Geopolitics

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277531087_Future_of_Natural_Gas_in_EU_Will_Geopolitics_Take_over_Economics

Article European Gas Supply Security and Geopolitics

Conference Paper Future of Natural Gas in EU: Will Geopolitics Take over Economics?

Lala,

First, you have to define what energy security/insecurity means in a simple layman term.

Who/what type of people are your respondents? energy professionals, or pedestrians, or some others? the types of people you will ask their opinion will shape the definition of energy security/insecurity.

You know there is no such thing as 'ordinary citizens'. Everyone has some kind of biased perception!!!

'Energy' is a very broad and vague term!! oil, gas, power, electricity all make up the term 'energy'. I suggest you come up with your own questions (originality of thoughts), rather than copy from another's work (questions).

If you want to go down that road, just let me know. I can check to see if your questions make sense.

The subject is not a rocket science!!

Regards,

Jeremy

If you are asking about 'several different dimensions', are you sure that you want to summarize this in a single index?  Sometimes this makes sense, but sometimes it does not (and you may be better allowing the different dimensions to be measured separately).  I don't know how many questions you are asking, but as a starting point, you could do an exploratory PCA and then see which items load highly on the first component.

Thank you very much for all of your responses. Dear Dr Yuri Yegorov, thank you or your papers, very interesting indeed. I am fully aware that it is tricky try to come up with a right definition for energy insecurity, as it might mean different things for different countries, people, etc. But I need to measure basic perceived energy insecurity attitudes of citizens with simple questions about the price (i.e. affordability, volatility), supply etc. for a definition, I rely on Cherp and Jewell (2014), and explore only a part of the definition examined in their paper. 

Dear Jeremy Lin, thank you. Indeed, the word "ordinary" was not the right word I intended to use. I will conduct the survey among respondents from a representative sample of Spanish citizens. I am exploring fossil fuels only. I did not intend to copy somebody's questions. I suppose I did not make myself clear enough. I did construct my own questions and I have pre-tested them among 1200 respondents. We will field the "real" survey later. But the outcome of the factor analysis for 4 questions that I designed, which were to measure 4 main dimensions of energy insecurity widely used in the literature (the seminal 4 A's) has not yielded a satisfactory result (and variables are not very much correlated between themselves), which has made me doubt about my questions. I wanted to construct a reliable energy insecurity index.

But, I think, Tony Peter Craig, you are right about this, perhaps I better take my variables separately and explore their separate effects, because they measure different dimensions which might not correlate well in practice, such as one question on the affordability of electricity prices, and another on the equitable access to energy for all, etc.  

On the other hand, I have realized that the response scales for these variables were different . I wonder if it could have an influence on Cronbach's alpha test? I have conducted pca and Eigenvalue is low for all components. 

I have just read Sovacool et al (2012) and they conducted surveys on perceived energy insecurity among citizens of different countries. I will see if I can adapt some questions, also make my response scales consistent. 

Thank you very much indeed for your responses. Any more suggestions are welcome. 

Lala,

I'd like to see your survey questions (the first set?) on energy insecurity in English. I guess you wrote that in Spanish?? Once I see them, I can give you more feedback.

Muchas Gracias!!

Jeremy

Lala, you might even post preliminary questions here to get some feedback. In this particular case you need to know how scientific they are to cover various important components and meanings on energy (in)security. They also should be understandable for ordinary people (this is always true for surveys) and in the right sense.

Perhaps you should start from classification of components of energy security based on scientific literature. Then you should figure out typical perception of energy security in press. Sometimes public opinion may be non-scientific but quite persistent. It is good if your survey will allow to study both issues. But in any case you should start from theory.