Reliability, validity and invariance of the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire in the China General Social Survey

Abstract

Moral sensitivity of individuals plays a crucial role in the prediction of moral behavior, but the moral values of Chinese culture are different from the west, and we need a simple way to measure the moral sensitivity of Chinese people. This study puts forward a method for measuring the moral sensitivity of Chinese individuals from the perspective of the levels of the moralization model. The sample in the study 1 included 21,054 Chinese persons aged between 18 and 95. Through exploratory factor analysis, we established a model of the scale and verified the stability and invariance of the model across gender and age through confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. Study 2 included a sample of 1951 primary, middle and high school students between the ages of 8 and 19. By means of confirmatory factor analysis, we again verified the factor structure of this questionnaire, and used a series of moral emotion questionnaires (Three Domains of Disgust Scale, Gratitude Questionnaire, Dispositional Positive Emotion Scales, Dispositional Greed Scale) to verify the structural validity. The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that the goodness-of-fit indices fits well. The multi-group confirmatory factor analysis suggested that configural, metric, scalar, and error variance invariance holds across genders and age groups. The results of the latent mean difference test showed that the latent mean scores were comparable between genders and age groups. The results of correlational analysis show that the scale has a high structural validity. In conclusion, the results of this study showed that the moral sensitivity scale has high reliability and validity in Chinese people.