The Organization and Methods of Investigation

The investigation used five methodologies: one for assessing the level of happiness, three for assessing moral orientations, and one additional methodolo­gy, Integral Quality of Life Rating (IQLR),¹⁰ was used to facilitate a better understanding of the psychological traits of people with different moral orienta­tions. The IQLR helped to study differences in vital values (questions No. 6, 7, 8, 19, 23, 36) in estimates of family financial standing (No. 12), private life (No. 2), satisfaction with private (family) life (No. 15), moods (No. 31), life’s com­forts as a whole (No. 30), life’s troubles (No. 3), and opportunities for improv­ing living conditions (No. 5).

The level of happiness was assessed on the basis of the Oxford Happiness Inventory operating in the range from 29 to 116 points.¹¹ It should be mentioned that this inventory gauges the general positive emotional background, the emo­tional component of being satisfied with life, which could be defined as the back­ground state of happiness, rather than the state of happiness at a given moment of time.

Respondents’ moral orientation was assessed on the basis of the disposition to egoism scale¹² and two value normative methods (VNM) for diagnosing the convictions “You should not misappropriate other people’s property” and “You should not take bribes.” These two have been chosen from a number of moral convictions because misappropriation and bribery are the two main Russian problems today, which have an extremely negative effect on the population as a whole, while being increasingly perceived as acceptable phenomena in people’s consciousness. Under these circumstances, a person’s conviction that it is inad­missible to appropriate other people’s property or to take bribes will bear witness to his or her enduring moral stability.

The author of the present article has developed the methods for diagnosing the convictions “You should not appropriate other people’s property” and “You should not take bribes” proceeding from the requirements applied to the VNM¹³ in keeping with Georgy Zalessky’s value active approach to studying convic­tions. A moral conviction, according to Zalessky, must combine a positive atti­tude to a moral standard and readiness to act accordingly.¹⁴ The first part of the VNM methods, therefore, models concrete situations involving observance of the moral standard, while part two models discussions revealing a respondent’s view with regard to whether it is admissible to breach the moral standard. The methods have passed the reliability and validity test and conform to the general­ly accepted requirements applied to the psychodiagnostic methodologies. The “You should not misappropriate other people’s property” VNM operates in the

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range from 0 to 23 points, and the “You should not take bribes” VNM rates from 0 to 23 points.

The study involved 407 respondents aged from 15 to 79 years (average age 27 years) in Moscow and the Moscow Region. Almost all respondents in the non-teenage group had a higher education or were taking a university course. Practically all the pension age respondents had a job.

To identify differences in the level of happiness in people with different moral orientations, the sample was divided into three groups characterized by the positive (“+”), negative (“‒”) and unobvious (“0”) moral orientation. The “+” group included respondents possessing these three characteristics simultaneously:

• a higher-than-average level of the moral conviction “You should not mis­appropriate other people’s property,” who gained more than a half of the 23 possible points;

• a higher-than-average level of the conviction “You should not take bribes,” who gained more than a half of the 20 possible points;

• a lower-than-average level of egoism, who gained 36 or fewer points out of 70.

In all, 73 (18%) persons aged from 15 to 79 years (average age 33years) were included in the “+” group. The “‒” group with the negative moral orienta­tion was formed on the same principle, with its members gaining less than a half of points under each of the conviction diagnostic methods and 37 and more points on the egoism scale. In all, the “‒” group included 148 (36%) persons aged from 15 to 62 years (average age 25 years). The remaining 186 (46%) respondents aged from 15 to 66 years were included in the “0” group with an unobvious moral orientation (average age 27 years).

The groups were equalized age-wise so as to maximally preserve the least numerous “+” group. Following equalization, the “+” and “‒” groups were left with 69 and 66 members respectively (average age 31 and 33 years), and the “0” group, with 138 members (average age 30 years). All the three groups do not dif­fer in terms of age (t-test). The groups were not equalized in terms of sex because neither Russian nor Western scientists identified any sex influences on the level of happiness.¹⁵ The Mann-Whitney U-test was used to estimate certainty of hap­piness-level differences between the groups. The results were processed with the help of Statistica 6.0 software.