An English-Language adaptation and validation of the Justice Sensitivity Short Scales-8 (JSS-8)

PLoS One. 2023 Nov 6;18(11):e0293748. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293748. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

The construct of justice sensitivity has four perspectives that capture individual differences in the strength of reactions to injustice when becoming a victim of injustice (victim sensitivity), when witnessing injustice as an outsider (observer sensitivity), when passively benefitting from an injustice done to others (beneficiary sensitivity), or when committing an injustice (perpetrator sensitivity). Individual differences in these four justice sensitivity perspectives are highly relevant in moral research. With just eight items in total, the Justice Sensitivity Short Scales-8 (JSS-8) are a very efficient way to measure the four perspectives. JSS-8 was initially constructed in German (Ungerechtigkeitssensibilität-Skalen-8, USS-8) and later translated into English. In the present study, we empirically validated this English-language adaptation in a heterogeneous quota sample from the UK. The results show that the psychometric properties (i.e., reliability, validity, standardization) of JSS-8 are good, and that they are comparable with those of the German-language source version. Because of the invariance of loadings, intercepts, and residual variances, researchers can compare manifest scale statistics (i.e., means, variances) of JSS-8 across the UK and Germany. JSS-8 is thus particularly suitable for measuring justice sensitivity in various research areas with constraints on assessment time and questionnaire space.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Individuality*
  • Language*
  • Psychometrics / methods
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Social Justice
  • Surveys and Questionnaires

Grants and funding

We confirm that the funder GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany, provided support in the form of an internal grant, which covered the costs for data collection (we cannot give a specific grant number because there were none). The funder did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.