Luppo Kuillman

Chapter 3 78 Appendix 1: an overview of used measures Instrument Detailed description Defining Issues Test (N2) To assess the level of moral reasoning in this study we used the Dutch short-form version of the Defining Issues Test (DIT) (Raaijmakers et al. 2005). In the DIT (short form) par- ticipants were presented with three, scenario-based, moral dilemmas: “Heinz and the drug,” “The escaped prisoner,” and “The newspaper”. Each scenario was followed by eight statements that were meant to evoke the respondent’s de- liberations in solving the dilemma. DIT Rating scales. For each moral dilemma, eight state- ments had to be answered on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from “very unimportant” (1) to “very important” (5), and were considered to be indicative of a specific stage in the level of moral reasoning: (i) Personal interest, (ii) Main- taining norms, and (iii) Post-conventional, respectively. After rating all eight statements for each dilemma, the participant was asked to rank four statements out of eight as “most im- portant,” “second in importance,” “third in importance,” and “fourth in importance”. N2 Index. The N2 index is the successor of the conventional P index and has a two-part construction. The first part re- flects the degree to which post-conventional arguments are prioritized in solving the moral dilemmas presented. This part of the N2 index resembles both the traditional P index (calculated solely on the basis of ranking data) and rating data reflecting the degree to which higher-stage arguments are rated higher than the ratings of lower-stage arguments, by subtracting lower-stage reasoning scale scores from the ratings on higher-stage reasoning scale scores. After stan- dardizing the scores of the second part in such a way that both parts show the same mean and standard deviation, the N2 score is computed by adding the resulting scores of the two parts. The N2 index was calculated, as explained by Rest and colleagues (Rest et al. 1997). A higher N2 score rep- resents a higher level of moral reasoning.