Perceived Justifiability Towards Morally Debatable Behaviors Across Europe

Marco Marozzi ()
Additional contact information
Marco Marozzi: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2021, vol. 153, issue 2, No 16, 759-778

Abstract: Abstract Scientific interest in studying justifiability towards morally debatable behaviors across nations is considerable, but the statistical assessment of the issue has not been very rigorous so far. In fact, many authors measure the related constructs computing composite indicators of justifiability as unweighed averages of perceived justifiability towards morally debatable behaviors. Other than not allowing for different weights, another drawback is that even if the items have different variability, no transformation like the z score is typically applied before computing the average. Another major shortcoming of the available justifiability indexes is the lack of robustness analysis of the results, making their message weak. The aim of this paper is to design very general composite indicators of justifiability towards dishonest-illegal and personal-sexual behaviors without the shortcomings of the other indicators. The indexes are computed for a data set from the European Values Study covering 47 countries and regions. The results show that Sweden, Netherlands and Finland are the most permissive countries towards personal-sexual behaviors followed by other Western and Scandinavian countries, whereas the strictest countries are Kosovo and Turkey. The most permissive countries towards dishonest-illegal behaviors are all ex-communist countries with Belarus and Slovak Republic being the most permissive countries whereas the strictest ones are Northern Cyprus and Turkey.

Keywords: Composite indicator; Societal looseness–tightness; Cross-cultural differences; Uncertainty analysis; Monte Carlo methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-020-02490-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:153:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11205-020-02490-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-020-02490-w

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().