Measuring Care and Justice Moral Orientation: Italian Adaptation and Revision of the MMO-2 Scale

Abstract

This study presents the Italian adaptation of the Measure of Moral Orientation, second revision (MMO-2). Based on Carol Gilligan’s theory of the Ethics of Care, the MMO-2 was designed to measure two complementary moral stances, namely, Care and Justice. For this study, questionnaire responses from 683 university students were assessed against an Italian-adapted MMO-2 scale. Data were analyzed through exploratory structural equation modeling first as separate scenarios and then as a single model. The final model comprises 4 intercorrelated pairs of latent variables and shows highly satisfactory goodness of fit indices with moderate construct validity and reliability. Strengths, limitations, and directions for the future developments of the MMO-2 are discussed.

Keywords:

• Measure of Moral Orientation
• ethics of care
• ethics of justice
• exploratory structural equation modeling
• composite reliability

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to Professor Debora Liddell for the precious advice she offered for the development of this paper. We also thank Raffaella Rispoli for administering a portion of the MMO-2 questionnaires. Last, we thank the students who took part in our research.

Notes

¹ Male and female Italian nouns and adjectives require different final vowels and definite/indefinite articles.