Profiling students' caring for self and others: circles, priorities, and moral reasoning orientation

This dataset supports a latent profile analysis (LPA) study of students' caring-for-self/other profiles, combining two researcher-developed constructs: the Caring Priority Hierarchy (CPH), measured via forced-ranking of six circles of care, and Moral Reasoning Orientation (MRO), measured via nine care-versus-justice vignettes. The sample comprised 1,015 secondary and higher-education students from Kurdistan Province, Iran (57.5% secondary, aged 14–17; 42.5% higher education; 56.0% female, 44.0% male). Using Mplus 8.11, a three-profile solution was identified — the Outward-Prioritising Profile (OPP), Self–Close Prioritising Profile (SCPP), and Expanded Prioritising Profile (EPP) — differing in how students prioritise self, close others, distant others, and nonhuman entities, and in their moral reasoning orientation across these circles. The repository includes the de-identified analytic dataset (SPSS and CSV), a full codebook, and the Mplus syntax and output files for the 1-, 2-, and 3-profile models, enabling independent verification of all reported model-fit statistics.