Do Strengths Converge into Virtues? An Item-, Virtue-, and Scale-Level Analysis of the Italian Values in Action Inventory of Strengths-120

Abstract

The Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) is a widely-used measure for character. Its factorial structure is still debated, however, and previous validation studies usually failed to examine the unidimensionality of the single character strengths. In addition, no studies to date have examined its Italian version. We validated the structure of the Italian short form of the VIA-IS in a sample of 16722 participants. Using confirmatory factor analysis and treating items as ordinal variables, we followed three simple, but too often neglected, steps: we studied the unidimensionality of the single strengths first, then their convergence into second-order virtues, and then fitted a hierarchical model that includes items, strengths and virtues, as originally proposed by Peterson and Seligman. All strengths except “love of learning” were unidimensional, and both the virtues and the final hierarchical models showed acceptable fit indices, unlike three models derived from an exploratory factor analysis. The same findings emerged for a smaller sample of 1035 participants. Finally, both character strengths and virtues showed positive relations with general mental health and negative relations with psychological distress. These results are discussed considering previous studies on the factorial structure of the VIA-IS.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the VIA Institute for giving us access to the data used in this study and for granting us permission to use them for this publication.

Declaration of interest statement

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The authors have no potential conflicts of interest to report.

Data availability statement

Data for Sample 2 are available on Figshare. Doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.13353539

Notes

1 These data were collected for a study already published: Casali et al., 2020

Additional information

Funding

The present work was conducted as part of the Dipartimenti di Eccellenza research program (DM 11/05/2017 n. 262), supported by a grant from MIUR to the Department of General Psychology, University of Padua.