The Development Of Virtues Adjective Rating Scale And Its Applied Study

Moral is important but not sufficient. Harmonious society needs virtues. Moral development overemphasizes the reasoning component of moral development to the neglect of virtue and upbringing. Both an ethic of duty and an ethic of virtue are necessary for understanding moral development. Virtue is diluted into a morally neutral concept of personality in the modern ethnics. It seems that the progression from the Virtues tradition to Kantian ethics to Kohlberg's Stage Model to Rest's DIT P score have left moral psychology with only one small slice of the moral pie.The study of virtues, after being incorporated into psychological categories, expand the scope of personality research, and enrich the studies on morality, which therefore is a supplement for the tendency of overemphasizing responsibility ethics in modern psychology and ethnics.In this study, virtues are defined as a group of individual's mental qualities which are stable and positively socially evaluated. Based on the exploration of the structure of virtues by means of the research methods as psycholexical approach and factor analysis, the Virtue Adjectives Rating Scale (VARS) is developed, through which, the relationship between virtues and personality and the characteristics of Chinese virtues are examined. This work is dedicated to the localization of the study of virtues. The paper is comprised of six chapters as the following:The first chapter is Introduction, which defines the concept of virtue, and reviews the foreign and home literature on the cognition and judgment of morality, in which responsibility ethics is stressed, and that virtue ethics neglected, as well as, discusses the research methods of psycholexical approach and factor analysis, and personality- trait theories.Chapter Two is the Study of Psycholexical Approach of Adjectives on Virtues. 378 adjectives describing virtues were gotten by the way of focusing gradually with the traditional psycholexical approach. Subjects were investigated then in desirability, meaningfulness, familiarity and self-Rating, and 109 adjectives were obtained, by canceling those, which are below 3 in mean desirability, below 4 in mean meaningfulness, below 4 in mean familiarity, below 0.3 in communalities, below 0.3 in factor loading, and between 0.3~0.4 in factor loading in some item with more than two factors. A survey on the virtue adjectives rating was thus developed.Chapter Three is the Development of the Virtue Adjectives Rating Scale (VARS). 762 university students and high school students participated in this study. They made a self-evaluation on 109 adjectives of virtues. By factor analysis, 19 items, which are low in communalities and factor loading, are deleted; the left 90 adjectives items can be explained by 5 big factors with a 46.37 percent contribution to the variance. The result shows that VARS is high in validity as construct validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity and criterion-related validity, as well as in reliability, such as split-half reliability, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability.Chapter Four is Comparative Study on Virtue Structure between the West and China. 426 Chinese university students were surveyed with two virtues scales of VARS and Cawley III, through which the correlation between them and the fitness of the western virtues rating scale. The result shows that there lies inconsistency in content and cultural difference in structure between the Chinese virtue Rating and the western one.Correlative Study between Virtues and personalities is the fifth chapter. In this study, 426 university students were inquired with the scale of 16PF. The result suggests that there are complicated correlation among the factors in VARS and 16 PF and Virtue and personality are two separated identities.Chapter Six is Conclusion and Future Research Directions. The study found, first, virtues are a group of independent mental qualities instead of part in personalities as we have regarded. Second, some personalities are hued with social evaluation. Third, Chinese virtues are different from the western ones in content and structure. Sampling university students and high school students as subjects may affect the feasibility of the structure, there may be deviation in the choose and explanation of adjective items, the labeling of the factors about virtues here perhaps are not the best ones, especially mentioned here is the correlative study is limited, more studies on theories building and experiments should be conducted in the future. Moreover, sampling scope should be widen and volume be enlarged, the evaluation of virtues should consider other ways as project test, other's Rating, etc. to avoid the error by single way of appraisal. Last, a context based self-evaluated scale should be developed with the incorporation of culture, psychological and linguistic factors in the future research.