Measurement invariance of the moral vitalism scale across 28 cultural groups.

• Main Authors: Maksim Rudnev, Christin-Melanie Vauclair, Samira Aminihajibashi, Maja Becker, Michal Bilewicz, José Luis Castellanos Guevara, Emma Collier-Baker, Carla Crespo, Paul Eastwick, Ronald Fischer, Malte Friese, Angel Gomez, Valeschka Guerra, Katja Hanke, Nic Hooper, Li-Li Huang, Minoru Karasawa, Peter Kuppens, Steve Loughnan, Müjde Peker, Cesar Pelay, Afroditi Pina, Marianna Sachkova, Tamar Saguy, Junqi Shi, Mia Silfver-Kuhalampi, Florencia Sortheix, William Swann, Jennifer Yuk-Yue Tong, Victoria Wai-Lan Yeung, Brock Bastian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2020-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233989

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. The Moral Vitalism Scale had been designed to assess moral vitalism in a brief survey form. Previous studies established the reliability and validity of the scale in US-American and Australian samples. In this study, the cross-cultural comparability of the scale was tested across 28 different cultural groups worldwide through measurement invariance tests. A series of exact invariance tests marginally supported partial metric invariance, however, an approximate invariance approach provided evidence of partial scalar invariance for a 5-item measure. The established level of measurement invariance allows for comparisons of latent means across cultures. We conclude that the brief measure of moral vitalism is invariant across 28 cultures and can be used to estimate levels of moral vitalism with the same precision across very different cultural settings.