Measures
MORAL DISENGAGEMENT SCALE (MDS)
The original MDS (Hymel et al., 2005) included 18 items reflecting each one
of the four broad categories of processes of moral disengagement identified
by Bandura (1999). However, Hymel et al. (2005) used only 13 items that
loaded significantly on a single, reliable factor (a = .81). With this study’s
sample, we performed a factor analysis on the original 18 items and
retained 15 items that loaded at least .36 on a single factor (a = .86) that
accounted for 40% of the variance (see Table 1). Participants answered each
item on a 4-point Likert response scale: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree,
3 = agree, and 4 = strongly agree.