SRMP: assignment 6

Part 1/2 (JASP)

Open Assignment6_data. These come from a large study (Smith et al., 2017) which tested whether ‘moral foundations’ (Haidt & Joseph, 2004) can be linked to political ideology. Australian subjects filled in a 20 item questionnaire on their ‘moral foundations’ (with four items per dimension, e.g. ‘Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue’; six-point Likert scale, 0 = ‘strongly disagree’, 5 = ‘strongly agree’). ‘Moral foundation’ variables start with the letters MF and at the end of their labels they have a letter denoting to which dimension they belong (c = Care/Harm, f = Fairness/Cheating, l = Loyalty/Betrayal, a = Authority/Subversion, d = Disgust/Purity).

Consider the five aggregated ‘moral foundations’ variables: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. These variables are also already summed in their according dimension, such that the higher the score, the more a participant found the moral dimension important/relevant. Imagine that you hypothesize that scores on these variables are predicted by political ideology (IDEO ranging from 1 - very liberal - to 3 - very conservative), age (AGE) and sex (SEX).

  1. Fit models to test for the effects of IDEO, Age and Sex on each of the aggregated ‘moral foundations’ variables and interpret the findings. Note that you do not have to use APA format, but you should give information about the direction, significance and meaning of all effects tested. (9 points)

Part 2/2 (Conceptual)

  1. Consider all of the assumptions of the modelling technique you used in the previous section. For one of the independent variables, checking for one of these assumptions would be redundant. Explain why it is not important to check this assumption with respect to the variable in question. (3 points)
  2. A colleague suggests you think carefully about the inclusion of Age in your models. Why might they be concerned about this? (2 points)
  3. Yet another colleague expresses concern about the type-I error rate of your approach. What might underlie their concerns, and what might you do to address them? (3 points)

References

Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365555
Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, J. R., Martin, N. G., & Hatemi, P. K. (2017). Intuitive ethics and political orientations: Testing moral foundations as a theory of political ideology. American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 424–437. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12255
Publisher Copyright: 2016, Midwest Political Science Association