Morality Website Collaboration
From PsychWiki - A Collaborative Psychology Wiki
This is a page where we can collaboratively come up with ideas for a consumer oriented morality website....
Contents |
Domain name
YourMorals.org (with yourmorals.com redirecting to that site)...
Marketing ideas (Getting Traffic)
- I think it will be easy to direct traffic to our site. I do a few radio and magazine interviews every month, and can just mention the site once its up. And my happiness hypothesis page gets 60 unique visitors a day, from all over the world. I can put a link on the front page, we should get a few a day from that. And if the site is rewarding, it will spread by word of mouth.--Jon
- Adwords Campaign?
- Scale-a-thons: we can offer sororities or other groups the opportunity to give us data for money that we would pay to their charitable cause. Such people would simply enter a special word in our open field on the registration page, e.g., "UVA Kappa Kappa Gamma", and then we'd pay them, say $5 if the person does 5 scales. This might be particularly good for getting people to do ALL our scales.
Content - Questions to add somewhere
ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS WE MIGHT ASK:
- When we ask about specific policies and issues we might want to add Skitka's questions about moral mandates: "My attitude about abortion [gay marriage, immigration restrictions, etc.] is closely related to my core moral values and convictions.” [Sena]
We MIGHT also collect
- What are the first 3 words that occur to you when you think of political conservatives?___
- What are the first 3 words that occur to you when you think of political liberals___
- Issues/Policies attitudes:
- Please indicate the extent to which you support each of the following policies/issues by checking the appropriate option. 1 - strongly oppose to 7 -strongly support - I'm adding more policies/issues that I took from a recent Jost et al. study. [Sena]
- Increased funding of the military
- Abortion
- Stem cell research
- Spending to improve education
- Spending for the poor
- Spending to improve/protect the environment
- Capital punishment
- Same-sex marriage (I think "same sex" might be a less threatening way to put it than "gay" for some people)
- Affirmative Action policies
- Stricter sentencing for drug offenders
- Tighter immigration restrictions
- Government-sponsored national health care
- Maintaining tax breaks for large corporations
- Protecting large budgets for police departments
SCALES WE MIGHT POST
Here is our master list of scales that are candidates for posting (along with comments/justifications) Inlcude citations for each scale, so we know which version to use
A)FIRST BATCH, SUBMITTED TO UVA IRB
- 5 Foundation Scale (revised, the MFQ-41, with 30 tested items, 10 alternate items, and 1 catch item).
- Schwartz values scale (56 items)
- Entity/Incremental scale (14 items; reference?)
- The Disgust Scale - Revised (25 items - need to get from Jon)
- Moral Identity Scale (16 items; reference?)
- Moral mandate scale (22 items; reference?)
- Deont-Util scale (8 scenarios, 2 questions for each; reference?)
- Rotter's locus of control scale (29 items; reference?)
- Forsyth's Ethics Position Questionnaire (20 items)
- SDO (14 or 16 item version? - Ravi's version differs from Pratto & Sidanius 1994 a bit)
- RWA (which version? Jesse's used the 30-item version but it's VERY dated-sounding; PI just switched to a newer 15-item short form; I'd say let's use the shorter one, unless we're interested in the more extreme statements and dated aspects)
- Interpersonal Reactivity Index (28 items; reference?)
- Pers. Belief in a Just World (7 items)
- Levenson's Psychopathy scale (26 items; reference?)
- Rest's Defining Issues Scale (17 items on Heinz dilemma - isn't there an updated DIT?)
- Big 5 (which version)? include the long questionnaire for Openness only?
B) SECOND BATCH, IDEAS FOR THE FUTURE
- More traditional Kohlbergian moral reasoning questionnaires
- I think moral dilemmas are really engaging for people, and might help draw people into the site. There are of course the trolley & footbridge problems and Jon's classic ones (sex with a chicken). I also have a series of scenarios that were developed by Tom Gilovich and Bob Frank at Cornell that are designed as a scale of a propensity toward consequentialist vs. deontological thought. These kinds of scales can be more than fun diversions of course. I use dilemmas that then manipulate certain aspects of them to examine how motivations affect moral judgments. They can be stuck into a series of other scenarios to provide cover. The other scenarios can also serve as baseline measures (e.g., of a tendency toward consequentialism) or as other dvs. That is, one of tools we are using now to examine the motivated recruitment of moral principles is to look at "carry-over" effects. If we induce people to rely a certain kind of principle to support a desired judgment, their reliance on the principle "carries over" to other judgments (e.g., if we induce people to get more consequentialist on one judgment, they are more consequentialist on subsequent judgments as well. Bottom line -- I think scenarios (in addition to scales) are fun and terribly useful -- Pete
C) Scale ideas from Jesse's IAT ppt.
- Need for Cognitive Closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994) – full or Jost’s 4-item version?
- Protestant Work Ethic (Mirels and Garrett, 1971) – 11
- Kay/Jost system-justification scale – 8
- Jost/Thompson economic system justification – 17
- Duckitt’s perceptions of a dangerous world scale
- Jost’s acceptance of change and inequality scales
MISC IDEAS
- Researach strategy: let's test conservative and liberal folk theories about the other side. Rather than just testing whether conservatives are high on SDO, we can test the Cons folk idea that libs are low on personal responsibility [ravi's idea]
- We don't have to have just simple surveys....we could do some experiments as well and see how 5F and other moral measures correlate with other experiments. Personally, I'm interested in seeing how they correlate with intergroup and political attitude change.
[jon]Absolutely! Jesse and I are interested in whether political persuasion (support for policies and candidates) can be increased by matching foundations used in an appeal to the foundations endorsed by the listener. We definitely want the ability to do experiments. Perhaps we should have a list of scales, from which we rarely or never remove anything, so that people can always come back and see their scores, and can have the sense that they have completed all the scales. But we also have a page of experiments where we give them a debriefing right after, but otherwise don't tell them their specific results.
- We could have a "secret" page where we post our less important questionnaires, so that our main subject stream doesn't see them. And then we could open up that page only to people who have already done most or all of our featured questionnaires.Or so that we can direct captive populations (e.g., our classes) to the secret page.
Legal details, etc.
Just to avoid any possible future hassles, we may want to think about who 'owns' or gets to publish whatever data we collect. Is the site open to all morality researchers to collect data? Perhaps Project Implicit provides a good model for these potentially sticky issues?
[jon]For the first year or two, i think it should just be a collaboration among the 5 of us. It will be hard enough to manage, and to get enough traffic to satisfy all our research fantasies. We also don't have a grant, as project implicit does. Perhaps in the future we could look into doing that. And perhaps we could "vote" to admit a few new members into our collaboration. But unless we have a full time programmer and administrator, I think we should just keep it simple.
[Jon] As for authorship: I think our general spirit should be (and is likely to be) cooperative without being fully communal. That is, I don't think we should assume that every study run here is a joint venture that all 5 of us would be authors on. But on the other hand, to the extent that any of us make more of a contribution than just offering advice at the early stage, that person would become a co-author. If Ravi is doing most of the work to help us all collect data, then Ravi might be in a position to deserve authorship credit more often, especially for our early projects. I want to be sure that everyone benefits from this collaboration, especially the grad students who have more of a rush need to get authorships. I think what's likely to happen is that we'll each put up a few studies more or less separately, and then find that it makes sense to write a manuscript that combines multiple studies. Or Pete or I will be invited to write a theory paper or review paper, for which it makes sense for us all to work together. So I expect that we'll see many joint-authored projects. But each of us should feel free to put up a simple questionnaire or study without feeling that doing so automatically invites co-authors. What do y'all think?
Jon has it exactly right here I think. I don't think we have to assume that everyone is part of everything that goes on on the site. Like any other research endeavor, it should depend on whether people contribute to projects, intellectually and/or logistically. In this sense I also think that Ravi might end up on more things than others, given his crucial technological role. I don't suspect any of this will be a problem with this group -- and ideally, of course, this kind of joint site will promote a lot of discussion and collaboration. We will have to figure out a way to pick and choose what is up on the site -- as I suspect it only makes sense to have a small number of project front and center at any one time. I don't have a good sense for how a website for this works -- how much can be up and available at once to maximize efficient data collection -- but we will have to sort this out -- Pete
Sounds good =) [Sena]
How to submit a scale to the site?
So that you guys have a bit more control and I don't have to be so much of a gatekeeper to adding your studies, here are some guidelines for submitting your own surveys/studies....
The Basics
Your survey/study will be a collection of text files that you'll email me. It could be as few as 2 files for a single survey and feedback page...or it could be more if you want to have participants go through multiple pages.
Filenames
Make your filename relatively unique and descriptive. Your feedback page should be the name of your firstpage plus "_process". In addition all filenames should end in ".php". So for example, the Schwartz scale has 2 files, "schwartz.php" and "schwartz_process.php".
Headers
At the top of every study page should be this snippet of text which will take care of validating the user, collecting any data submitted from previous pages, etc...
<? include "studytop.php"; ?>
At the top of your final feedback page should be this snippet.... <? include "feedbacktop.php"; ?>
The Form Tag
After the header for study pages (not the feedback page) should be this form tag...
<form action="NEXTPAGE.php" method=post><?
NEXTPAGE should be the page that you want to go to next. For single page studies/surveys, make that page the name of your feedback page. If you are doing a mutiple page study, each page should name the successive page in place of NEXTPAGE.
Defining Question Format
You need to add the following 4 lines to define your scale.
$scalename = 'SCALENAME';
$scaletype = '7pt';
$scalebegin = 'not at all relevant';
$scaleend = 'extremely relevant';
The first line name of your scale...it will show up in your SPSS data file..it should be different for each page The second line defines how many points your questions scale will have. The third line defines the text for the beginning scale endpoint. The fourth line defines the text for the bend scale endpoint.
Defining Questions
For each question, add a line like this to your file...
addtoquestions('Whether or not someone believed in astrology');
If you want, you can define custom endpoints for a particular column by adding more information to this line...
An example... addtoquestions('Whether or not someone believed in astrology', 'Not Relevant!', 'Extremely Relevant!');
Add as many questions as you wish.
Display Instructions
Add this next to your file...
?> INSTRUCTIONS TEXT <?
Your INSTRUCTIONS TEXT should be in html if possible. You can use frontpage, dreamweaver or even microsoft word and cut/paste the relevant parts in if you want. Or you can write text and then replace all carriage returns with <br> and add " " wherever you want to add a space. Enclose anything you want bold in <b> and end it with </b>. I'm happy to clean this up for you or help you with it.
Display Questions
Add this to display questions
showallquestions(1);
The number 1 in parentheses will display questions in the order you put them in the file. If you put a "0" in the parentheses, the code will randomize the order of questions.
Add this to finish your page....
showfooter("BUTTON TEXT"); ?>
Replace BUTTON TEXT with whatever you want your submit button to say. For example, maybe you want it to say "See your results" and have your page go to the feedback page. Or "Continue" if your page goes to another part of the study.
The Feedback Page
The feedback page is basically a bunch of HTML/text which describes your survey. As noted above, it is named "_process.php" and begins with this tag...
<? include "feedbacktop.php"; ?>
After that, it can have almost any form as you can write whatever feedback you wish...However, you'll likely want to give them some visual feedback on their score and want to intersperse graphs with your text. Add graphs using these tags...
<?
$labels = array("Harm", "Fairness", "Loyalty", "Authority", "Purity");
$vars[0] = array(2, 3, 4,5,22,23,24,25);
$vars[1] = array(6, 7, 8,9,R26,27,28,29);
$vars[2] = array(10, 11, 12,13,30,31,32,33);
$vars[3] = array(14, 15, 16,17,34,35,36,R37);
$vars[4] = array(18, 19, 20,21,38,39,40,41);
showgraph("self", "Graph Title", "Labels Title", $labels, $vars);
?>
- The Labels line defines the labels for each bar on the graph.
- The numbers in each of the "vars" lines corresponds to the questions which contribute to that bar length. The user will be given a bar length equal to the average of their scores. An R before a number indicates reverse scoring.
- The showgraph line has a few things that one will want to change. You can change "self" to "others" if you want to show bars for others on the site. Eventually, I'll add a type of graph that combines self and others.
- Replace "Graph Title" with whatever title you want for the graph.
- Replace "Labels Title" with whatever you want to call each of the bar labels (ie. Foundations for the 5 foundations scale).
You may want to link to the more information or a paper on the scale.
After you finish with your feedback, add this tag...
<? include "feedbackfooter.php"; ?>
Complete Example
<?
include "studytop.php";
?>
<form action="entitym.php" method=post>
<?
$scalename = 'entitym';
$scaletype = '6pt';
$scalebegin = 'Strongly Agree';
$scaleend = 'Strongly Disagree';
addtoquestions('A person’s moral character is something very basic about them, and it can’t be changed much.');
addtoquestions('Whether a person is responsible or sincere or not is deeply ingrained in their personality. It cannot be changed very much.');
addtoquestions('There is not much that can be done to change a person’s moral traits (e.g., conscientiousness, uprightness, and honesty)');
?>
Please use the scale below to indicate the degree to which each statement describes your thoughts and feelings.
<br><table border=0><tr><td> [1] </td><td> [2]</td><td> [3]</td><td> [4]</td><td> [5]</td><td> [6]</td></tr>
<tr><td> Strongly </td><td> Moderately </td><td> Slightly</td><td> Slightly</td><td> Moderately </td><td> Strongly</td></tr>
<tr><td> disagree </td><td> disagree </td><td> disagree </td><td> agree</td><td> agree </td><td> agree</td></tr>
</table><?
showallquestions(2);
showfooter();
?>
Changes to be done
- Verify reverse scoring
- Improve generalizability of feedback pages
- Put up Entity/Incremental with Feedback
- Others and Self bars in same graph
- Save 1st time they do survey as special case
