Development of the Moral Standards in Daily Living Scale: the Impact of Moral Standards on Mental and Physical Health

Callan Ruth Lujan

doi:10.7273/000007924

Moral standards serve a critical self-regulatory role that has affective, motivational, and behavioral consequences (Higgins, 1987). Moral standards influence situations sought out or avoided, influence appraisals and affective responses to events, motivation levels, persistence, and performance, and ultimately guide behavior (Bandura, 2016). Based on the limitations of existing measures for assessing moral standards, I have developed a measure that aims to capture personally identified and contextually relevant moral standards. The Moral Standards in Daily Living Scale (MSDLS) is intended to assess the moral standards that the individual most frequently experiences in daily living and simultaneously quantifies how the individual thinks about those standards. The MSDLS first presents respondents with a list of 58 everyday situations and asks them to reflect on whether moral standards were activated in those situations. If respondents indicate a moral standard was activated in any given situation, they then classify it into one of 13 different moral standard categories based on Moral Foundation Theory (Graham et al., 2013). For the four most commonly endorsed moral standard categories, respondents then rate each moral standard across six quantitative thinking dimensions. The present study provides a description of MSDLS’s development and an initial evaluation of its psychometric properties and its relationship to mental and physical health outcomes. Item reduction analysis confirmed the retention of all 58 moral standard situations in the MSDLS, as no significant outliers were detected. Principal component analysis of the MSDLS revealed two distinct factors: 1) an Orientation Motivation component and 2) a Mastery Satisfaction component, which accounted for 65.03% of the variance. Correlation analyses demonstrated meaningful relationships among MSDLS dimensions and outcome measures. Mastery Satisfaction and adherence proportion showed associations with psychological well-being, character strengths, lower distress and somatic anxiety and higher positive affect. Regression analyses indicated that Mastery Satisfaction uniquely predicted psychological well-being beyond an existing moral standard measure. These findings support the initial construct validity and utility of the MSDLS in assessing moral standard self-regulation. This study provides the foundation for further research on a social cognitive approach to moral standard assessment.

Development of the Moral Standards in Daily Living Scale: the Impact of Moral Standards on Mental and Physical Health

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details