A Reliability and Validity Study of the Defining Issues Test: The Relationship of Age, Education, Gender and Parental Education with Moral Development

Abstract

The aim of the study is twofold: First and main aim was to develop a valid and reliable Turkish version of the Du which is one of the most important instruments in the psychology and education research; second is to explore the relationships between moral development and age, gender, education, and parental education. The study group consists of 584 volunteer participants from three universities. As an instrument of the present study, developed and validated Turkish version of the DIT which is "Degerleri Belirleme Testi (DBT)" was used. Three schemas, personal interests, maintaining norms, and post conventional, were obtained from the instrument. For three schemas obtained from the DIT, the values of Cronbach's alpha and test-retest correlation coefficients change in the range of .53 to .60. Face and content validity of the DIT were also provided. The relationships between moral development and other selected variables (age, education, gender, and parental education) were presented in the findings section.