Confirmatory factorial validity and reliability of the Global Belief in a Just World Scale – GJWS

Abstract

The belief in a just world is an essential construct for justice from a psychosocial perspective. However, only a few researchers in Brazilian psychology have being interested on this theme. In order to contribute to this subject, this study aimed at knowing the validity and reliability of the Global Belief in a Just World Scale (GJWS), and to verify the importance of gender, age, course, grade level, religiosity degree, marital status and income to account for its scores. This measure presented originally good psychometric properties, besides being of simple and rapid administration. Participants were 254 undergraduate students of a private university from Aracaju (Sergipe), with mean age of 21.8 years (sd = 6.34), most of them female, single, middle-class, attending the courses of Law and Psychology. They filled the GJWS – a unifactor brief measure, composed by seven items that assess the beliefs in a just world, rated on a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = Strongl disagree to 6 = Strongly agree. The main results showed that the GJWS is a valid and reliable instrument, and can be used in studies on this theme. The demographic variables didn’t show the expected importance though. Finally, the limitations of the current research and directions for future studies are discussed. Keywords: validity; reliability; belief in a just world; justice.

Keywords

• validade
• precisão
• crença no mundo justo
• justiça