Classroom Collective Moral Disengagement Scale: Validation in Czech adolescents

Abstract

Moral disengagement (MD) provides a fruitful framework for understanding how adolescents could attenuate moral self-regulation and behave aggressively. While measures of individual MD have a long tradition, only recently have Gini, Pozzoli, and Bussey developed an instrument measuring collective MD (CMD): Classroom Collective Moral Disengagement Scale (CCMDS). The present study examined psychometric properties of a Czech version of the scale with a sample of 662 adolescents, aged 11–15, from 20 randomly selected elementary schools. Participants completed the scale and a peer-rating measure of bullying, victimization, and defending. The analyses indicated that the CCMDS could be considered a unidimensional gender-invariant scale with very good internal consistency and criterion validity. Importantly, the scale score aggregated at the classroom level was associated with three bullying behaviors: bullying, victimization, and defending. The results support the use of the CCMDS as a promising measure of CMD.

Keywords:

• Aggressive behavior
• bullying
• defending
• moral disengagement
• victimization

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully thank to all participants and to Dr. habil. Pavlína Janošová for her valuable help with translation of the CCMDS and with the data collection.