Individual and School Correlates of DIT-2 Scores Using a Multilevel Modeling and Data Mining Analysis

Moral reasoning was investigated with respect to individual characteristics (i.e., education level, political orientation and sex) and school-related (i.e., university/college) factors using multilevel modeling and data mining analysis. We used the multilevel modeling to detect school effects on mor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied sciences Vol. 12; no. 9; p. 4573
Main Authors Bankhead, Meghan, Choi, Youn-Jeng, Patil, Yogendra, Thoma, Stephen J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2022
Subjects
College students
Community colleges
Composition effects
data mining analysis
Data search
Defining Issues Test-2
Education
Ethics
Higher education
Higher education institutions
Mission statements
Modelling
moral judgment development
Morality
Multilevel
multilevel modeling
Orientation
Politics
Reasoning
Websites
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Summary:Moral reasoning was investigated with respect to individual characteristics (i.e., education level, political orientation and sex) and school-related (i.e., university/college) factors using multilevel modeling and data mining analysis. We used the multilevel modeling to detect school effects on moral reasoning as well as individual effects for 16,334 students representing 79 different higher education institutions across the U.S. The school-related factors, such as the racial composition, student–faculty ratio, average SAT score, institution type, institutions’ geographical region, frequencies of morally relevant words in college course catalog, college mission and value statements were collected through website searches. Data mining analysis was utilized to extract and calculate the frequencies of morally relevant words from the website content. There were significant effects for the individual characteristic of political orientation. Additionally, all school-related factors were significant. Only main effects were observed for some school-related factors (i.e., average SAT score, institution type, frequency of morally relevant words in mission statements, value statements and course catalogs). For other school-related factors (i.e., the region, student–faculty ratio and racial composition), main effects were also observed; however, these effects were particularly illuminating given their interactions with political orientation. Implications for educational communities are discussed.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app12094573