Factorial complexity and Morally Debatable Behaviors

Abstract

Currently, from the scientific and professional practice point of view, comes out the necessity to know more about moral permissiveness, as it seems to be an increase in “moral relativism”.. Because it, it this is important to have tools to collect valid and reliable information about moral in social situations defined as social and personal behavior issue. This paper presents a technical note of The Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale (MDBS) from Harding & Phillips (1986), which was developed in USA and mainly focused on young people and adults. This technical note makes direct reference to a recent Latin American study (Merino & Grimaldo, 2010); this article focuses on the internal structure and the problems associated with evidences of factorial complexity among items of the MDBS. This means that the interpretation of scores is not factorially simple and could not be achieved by a conceptual distinction between the latent constructs applied to the study sample.. The results in the previous study of the factorial complexity leads the researcher to decide whether an instrument for measuring this aspect may contain a reasonable amount of complexity that is consistent with what is in reality, or look for the unidimensional and simple structure.

Keywords

• Factor Analysis
• Moral Permissive
• Validity