Gratitude as a moral virtue: a psychometric evaluation of the Gratitude Assessment Questionnaire in Chinese children

Abstract

Gratitude has been previously defined as a tendency to appreciate positives in life, thus conflating gratitude and components of well-being. Accordingly, current measures assessing “gratitude” are primarily based on this conflated conceptualization, and do not adequately assess gratitude as a moral virtue. The Gratitude Assessment Questionnaire (GAQ-C) was developed to assess child virtuous gratitude (VG). This study evaluates the psychometric properties of the GAQ-C in 641 Chinese children (M_age = 10.70, SD = 4.48), showing it to be a reliable and valid measure to assess Chinese child VG. Specifically, results of confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that virtuous gratitude consists of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components. Furthermore, child VG measured by the GAQ-C was associated positively with parental appreciation socialization, unlike child appreciation assessed by the 6-item Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6). Additionally, child VG was related to child depressive symptoms, life satisfaction, daily gratitude behaviors, and prosocial behaviors. Such results provide evidence of conceptual differences between gratitude and appreciation.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Author notes

Yue Liang, Jonathan R. H. Tudge, and Hongjian Cao contribute equally to the preparation of this manuscript.

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data are not available.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No. 2018M643038; and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China under Grant No. 2018NTSS06 and Grant No. 2019NTSS04.