Development and Validation of Moral Personality Inventory: A Semi Projective Technique

Research on the personality traits or virtues of morality has surged in recent years. The development of moral foundations theory (MFT) has played an important role, demonstrating the breadth of morality. Moral psychology has responded by investigating how different domains of moral judgment are shaped by a variety of psychological factors. Yet, the discipline lacks a validated set of moral explanation for moral personality or character. In this paper, this gap is addressed by developing and validating a set of moral virtues or traits. It is novel and an indigenous endeavour to tap moral character keeping in mind own culture traditions and norms. The questions to gauge different moral virtues, strengths and competencies grounded in own culture, values, norms and reflection of various theories and literature based on them. Scale has been developed in three phases. Phase one comprised of generation of item pool and phase two address the final selection of items for empirical validation. Phase III address the empirical validation on the sample of 500 undergraduate and post graduate students. Results showed that scale has the following six moral characters as final moral personality inventory i.e., honestly, empathy, loyalty, moral courage, fortitude and responsibility are identified as scales of moral character. Convergent and discriminant validities have also been established. Further, results reflect the hight alpha reliabilities values greater than .90 and high correlation values as a sign of reliable measure for further use in research.