Moral Thinking - Subject Baseline
This measure appears in the following time-points: Baseline.
Related Construct
Description of Measure
The Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement (Bandura, Barbarnelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996) was used for this study to measure the adolescent's attitudes concerning the treatment of others. The self-report measure contains 32 items to which participants respond on a 3-point Likert scale ranging from "Disagree" to "Agree," with higher scores indicating a greater moral detachment. Items from the scale tap the following eight dimensions: moral justification (e.g., "It is alright to beat someone who bad mouths your family."), euphemistic language (e.g., "Slapping and shoving someone is just a way of joking."), advantageous comparison (e.g., "It is okay to insult a classmate because beating him/her is worse."), displacement of responsibility (e.g., "Kids cannot be blamed for using bad words when all their friends do it."), diffusion of responsibility (e.g., "A kid in a gang should not be blamed for the trouble the gang causes."), distorting consequences (e.g., "Teasing someone does not really hurt them."), attribution of blame (e.g., "If kids fight and misbehave in school it is their teacher's fault."), and dehumanization (e.g., "Some people deserve to be treated like animals."). Other investigators using this measure and the instruments' authors, however, advise that the subscales should not be used because of their inconsistency and unreliability. As a result, we only calculate two scales indicating overall performance across all the items.
The moral disengagement overall score was found to have good internal consistency at the baseline time-point (alpha = .88). The CFA analyses done testing the fit of a single factor solution, however, were not impressive. The values for the fit of the one-factor model were: NFI=0.810, NNFI=0.855, CFI=0.865, and RMSEA=0.038. Allowing correlated measurement errors did not improve the fit significantly.
The two scales computed are:
- Moral Disengagement - overall [s0mordis]; the mean of all 32 items; data must be contained in 24 of the 32 items in order to receive a computed mean.
- Moral Disengagement - count [s0moral]; a count of all items for which the subject responded "agree". This summary score can range from zero to 32.
References
- Bandura, A., Barbarnelli, C., Caprara, G. V., & Pastorelli, C. (1996). Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 364-374.