Development, Validation, Reliability and Normalization of Benefit and Cost Scales: as a Factor to Explain Why Ethical Behaviors are Performed or Not Performed in Various Life Situations

This study was conducted with the aim of developing, validation, reliability, and normalization of benefit and cost scales as a factor to explain of performing or not performing moral behavior in various situations. In this study, to collect data, a mixed method was used. In the first stage (qualitative) with phenomenological qualitative research, an interview (structured interview) was performed with 222 people. Sampling method was availability sampling method based on theoretical saturation. The explicit content analysis method was used to analyze the interview data. The results indicate two factors of benefit (psychological benefit and situational benefit) for why performing moral behavior and two factors of cost (psychological cost and situational cost) for why not performing moral behavior. In the second stage (quantitative), based on the findings of content analysis, two scales of benefit (33-items) and cost (26-items) was developed to measure identified factors called psychological benefit, situational benefit, psychological cost, and situational cost.Then, based on multi-stage cluster random sampling method, in the study 1093 second grade high school students (515 girls and 578 boys) participated in Hamadan. The results of exploratory factor analysis extracted 4 factors named psychological benefit, situational benefit, psychological cost, and situational cost. The estimated Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients for the whole benefit scale was 0.954, and for subscales of psychological benefit, situational benefit were 0.918, 0.934, and Cronbach alpha coefficients for the whole cost scale was 0.965, and for subscales of psychological cost, situational cost were 0.949, 0.928 respectively.