Copyright Malvin Porter, Jr. 2010 - acumen - The University of ...

The mean, range, standard deviation, internal consistencies, and correlations were calculated for
the CBVS Action Choice (Prosocial vs. Aggressive) and the CBVS Justification Choices
(Justice/Fair vs. Prosocial/Care vs. Aggressive/Retribution) for each story and across all four
stories.
While the initial parametric analyses for internal consistency and correlations within
stories and subjects will be described in detail, results were found to be lower than anticipated.
Even though alpha can take on any value less than or equal to 1, including negative values,
higher values are more desirable; whereas, the rule of thumb requires a reliability of .70 or higher
obtained on a substantial sample (Lomax, 2001). Specifically, the findings for CBVS Action
Choice and CBVS Justification Choices revealed low positive to negative internal consistencies
and low positive correlations between all four stories. Findings for within CBVS Aggressive
Action Choices and CBVS Justification Choices for all four stories showed similar low internal
consistencies and both positive and negative values. These findings lead to the decision to not
use a general linear model approach to assess the rated data; but rather, to focus on nonparametic
analyses of the categorical ranked data. The nonparametric techniques subsequently used to
perform the final analyses will be discussed following the analytic descriptions of the rated data.
Table 3 presents the descriptive data and Cronbach alpha for the Prosocial Action Choice
subscales by each story on the CBVS. The first consideration was to calculate the means for
Prosocial Action Choice items for each story. However, internal consistencies for CBVS
Prosocial Actions were low for all four stories with a relatively small sample. While bystander
character/physical victimization story 1 and bystander character/relational victimization story 3
showed moderately low (.3220, .2405 respectively) internal consistencies for Prosocial Actions,
victim character/physical victimization story 2 showed a negative internal consistency (-2835)
72