Developing a Moral Values Scale for Urban Adolescents in India: Item Generation, Content Validity, and Exploratory Factor Structure

Abstract

Many scales of moral values in adolescents have been developed and validated in Western countries, leaving researchers and schools working in different cultural contexts like urban India with very little to no options. The present research article describes the first stage of a larger research project to construct and validate a moral values scale for secondary school students from urban Bangalore. An initial pool of 151 items, consisting of elements of moral development from various theorists and literature, was developed. This pool was reviewed by 29 experts and reduced to 71 items, and clustered into seven dimensions as Trust, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, Citizenship, and Psycho-Social Values. Following a pilot study with 150 students (Cronbach's alpha = .91), the 71-item version was administered to 3,241 students aged 12-16 from 12 schools across Bangalore's four zones and three educational boards (CBSE, ICSE, and the Karnataka State Board). After removing incomplete and outlier responses, data from 2,878 students were retained for exploratory factor analysis. Sampling adequacy was acceptable (KMO = .67; Bartlett's test, p < .001), and five successive rounds of exploratory factor analysis reduced the instrument to 20 items loading on seven factors, together explaining 62.7% of the variance. Internal consistency for the seven provisional dimensions ranged from .76 to .82. The resulting short-form questionnaire provides a psychometrically promising and culturally grounded starting point for measuring adolescent moral values in urban Indian schools, and is carried forward for confirmatory validation in a companion paper.