Resumo

BARREIRO, Alicia; ETCHEZAHAR, Edgardo  e  PRADO-GASCO, Vicente. Global belief in a just world: Validation of the Lipkus Scale in university students from city of Buenos Aires. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2014, vol.31, n.1, pp.57-71. ISSN 1668-7027.

The researches on the Belief in a Just World (BJW) started in the 60’ with the experimental studies carried out by Lerner (Lerner, 1965, 1980; Lerner & Clayton, 2011; Lerner & Simmons, 1966). Those studies pointed out that social injustices are frightening for individuals, therefore they need to belief that everyone gets what deserve during his or her life to maintain the control over their environment. If people do not believes that things happen as consequences of their acts, they will feel exposed to undesirable situations that today happen to others, but tomorrow could happen to them. Then, to deny this threat, they blame the victims of injustice, attributing to them the responsibility for their suffering. During the last decades, different studies have shown that individuals from different cultures around the world believe that the world is a just place, and the relations between this belief and socio-political factors (Furnham, 1993, 1998, 2003). In this vein, the system justification theory proposes that the BJW, together with the social dominance orientation (SDO; Jost & Hunyady, 2005; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth & Malle, 1994), contributes to support and rationalize the social order denying social injustices by appealing to the merit of the dominant social groups. Moreover, there are evidence that the BJW is positively associated to right wing authoritarianism (RWA- Altemeyer, 1996; Dalbert & Yamauchi, 1994; Moore, 2008) and political ideology self positioning (PI -Schlenker, Chambers & Le, 2012). The aim of this paper is to adapt and validate a Spanish version of the Global Belief in a Just World Scale (GBJWS) by Lipkus (1991) in a sample of university students. Hence, a self-reported questionnaire was administered to 328 university students of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) aged between 18 and 40 years old (M = 24.1, SD = 3.88), 36.6% were male (n = 120) and 63.4% female (n = 208). Besides, 61.28% of the participants studied Psychology and the remaining 38.72% studied Sociology, both at the University of Buenos Aires. Firstly a descriptive analysis of the items was performed. Secondly, the reliability of the scale was tested studding its internal consistence ( .83). Simultaneously, the construct validity was test by an exploratory factor analysis and a confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, the validity of criteria was studied by analyzing the relations between the GBJW, RWA, SDO, and PI. The results suggest adequate psychometric properties of the GBJWS in this sample of university students and verified the unidimensionality of the scale (X²_(df) = 54,01(14); S-B X²_(df) = 41,77(14); S-B X² / _(df) = 2,98; NNFI = .93; CFI = .96; ₂= .96; RMSEA = .08). Furthermore, GBJWS was positively associated with RWA (r = .35; p < .01), SDO (r = .36; p < .01) and negatively with PI (r = -.37; p < .01). It is considered that this paper contributes to the measuring of the GBJW since presents an adaptation and validation of ascale that wasn’t available in Spanish. This study had been done with a university sample because the construction and following adaptations of the original scales were made in such population (Bègue, 2002; Dalbert, Lipkus, Sallay, & Goch, 2001; O`Connor, Morrison, T. & Morrison, M., 1996). The relations between political conservatism are coherent with the support of the status quo, since if the world is thought as a just place, there is no reason to transform it (Furnham, 2003; Jost & Hunyady, 2005). This study had been done with a university sample because the construction and following adaptations of the original scales were made in such population (Bègue, 2002; Dalbert, Lipkus, Sallay & Goch, 2001; O`Connor, Morrison, T. & Morrison, M., 1996). However, it’s necessary to point out that this limitation doesn’t allow the generalization of the results to a general population. Hence, it is recommended for future studies to consider other populations to improve the generalization and representatively of the results presented in this paper.

Palavras-chave : Lipkus; Global Belief in a Just World Scale; Argentina; Validation; Political ideology self positioning; RWA; SDO; University students.

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