Factor Analysis of Society’s Moral State Indices in European Countries

The paper presents the instrument and the results of factor analysis of developmental and interaction characteristics dynamics that define the index of the moral state of society, developed by the Institute of Psychology, Russian Academy of Sciences. The alternative way of confirmatory factor analysis and Trained Markov Networks revealed a number of developmental patterns of problematic characteristics that indicate usage appropriateness of this index. The advantages of the applied type of factor analysis include: the possibility of finding estimates of free parameters of the model via direct methods (and not by iteration), that guarantee an unambiguous and optimal solution, flexible means of studying the factor interactions and the applicability of covariance and correlation matrices of arbitrary structure for the analysis. Markov Networks, in turn, revealed new types of indicators that are inaccessible to conventional approaches.

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