Moral Foundations Questionnaire: Problems and Peculiarities of Use in Russia

Moral assessment of international and domestic events, such as the special military operation in Ukraine, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the abortion ban, mandatory vaccination against COVID-19 and the recognition of LGBT in Russia as an extremist movement in 2023 and other events remain a subject of deep disagreement in society. From a research point of view, it is important to have a reliable and valid diagnostic tool. The MFQ toolkit was chosen for the study because there are no large-sample studies on its quality in Russia, it is widely recognized in moral sociology, and all-Russian data for its testing are available. The aim of the study: to evaluate the quality of the MFQ instrument on Russian data. The theoretical object is: MFQ instrument. The empirical object is: Russian adult population (Internet audience, 18+). Subject: quality of the MFQ toolkit. The study is based on unpublished VCIOM data collected for the Higher School of Economics. The sample is representative by type of locality, population of federal districts, gender and age. Data analysis includes description of the sample, analysis of the importance values of moral grounds, comparison of their mean values in sub-samples by socio-demographic characteristics and, most importantly, the quality of the model will be assessed using CFA and Cronbach's alpha. The quality of the MFQ instrument on the Russian data was found to be low: the CFA showed results below the acceptable level, and the values of Cronbach's alpha vary across socio-demographic groups, indicating a mismatch between theoretical constructs and empirical data. Nevertheless, Moral Foundations Theory and the updated MFQ are promising for future research in Russia, although the new version of the toolkit has not yet been tested on a nationwide sample.