Adaptation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire to Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract The study aimed to evaluate evidences of the validity of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in a version adapted to Portuguese, considering five foundations for moral judgment: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. 532 people were involved in this study throughout all of its phases. The procedures included translation/retranslation, analysis of adequacy on both languages and exploratory factorial analysis. The analysis indicated that the best solution found is a structure composed of two factors. The first one being the individualizing factor (a = 0.91) and, the second, the cohesive factor (a = 0.87), a solution which is compatible with the theory when the foundations of damage and justice are grouped together as opposed to the others. Evidences of convergent validity were found between the cohesion foundation and a religiosity measure. Concluding, the instrument distinguishes a pattern of moral choice of individualization, the most influential foundation, and its factorial structure corroborates the original version.