4. RESULTS
4.7 Summary of Results
Black women and White women) were all significantly negatively correlated, consistent with the polarity of these two subscales on the Moral Orientation Scale. Contrary to expectation, there were no significant positive correlations between scores on the Justice and Care subscales and the scores on any of the other subscales for any of the groups.
mean scores of the Black group. As hypothesized, Whites scored significantly higher than Blacks on the Justice subscale, while the Black group scored significantly higher than the White group on the Care subscale.
The sample by race and gender was divided as follows: 100 Black women, 95 Black men, 88 White women, and 63 White men. While White men scored higher on average than White women on the Autonomy subscale, and Black men scored higher than average than Black women on the Autonomy subscale, these differences were not significant. Analyzed for race and gender, results across all four groups showed that the mean scores on the Autonomy subscale of Black men, White men, and Black women were significantly higher than the mean scores of White women. Given that this was the only significant result found on the Autonomy subscale across all analyses, and given the unexpected significant positive correlations between
Autonomy and Relation subscale scores, it seems likely that the reliability of the results on the Autonomy subscale, and on the Relational Being Scale in general, is low. On the Relation
subscale, Black men, Black women, and White women all scored significantly higher than White men, as expected. The RISC mean scores of White women were significantly higher than those of Black women, Black men and White men. There were no other significant differences on this scale in the gender by race analysis. Black men scored unexpectedly higher than Black women on the RISC scale but this was not a significant difference.
The scores of White men on the Justice subscale were significantly higher than the scores Black men. Black men scored significantly higher on the Care subscale than White men. These were the only significant differences in the gender by race analyses on the Justice and Care subscales.
Although White men had higher Justice scores than White women and White women had higher Care scores than White men, these differences were not significant. Contrary to the hypothesis, Black women‟s Justice scores were higher than the Justice scores of Black men, while Black men scored higher on the Care subscale than did Black women. Neither of these differences was significant.
There were significant positive correlations between the subscale scores of men on Autonomy and RISC and between Relation and RISC. There were no significant positive correlations between any of the subscale scores for women. Analyzed by race alone, Autonomy and Relation were significantly positively correlated for the Black group, while Autonomy and RISC scores and Relation and RISC scores were significantly positively correlated for the White group.
Significant positive correlations were also found between the Autonomy subscale scores and RISC scores were found for Black men, White women, and White men. Moreover, the Autonomy and Relation subscale scores of Black men and White women were significantly positively correlated. Given that these results were unexpected and unlikely, it is probable that the low reliability of the Autonomy subscale in particular significantly influenced the results.
The Relation subscale scores and RISC scores of White men were significantly positively
correlated. No significant positive correlations were found for Black women on any of the scales.
Justice and Care subscale scores were significantly negatively correlated across all groups, consistent with their polarity on the Moral Orientation Scale.
In summary, the hypotheses of this study were only partially confirmed. In the primary analysis, hypotheses were tested by gender alone. In terms of gender differences on the Relational Being
Scale subscales, the hypothesis that women would show significantly higher results on Relation than men was supported, suggesting higher levels of relational autonomy in women. Although the direction of difference on the Autonomy subscale was as predicted (men higher than women), this difference was not statistically significant and therefore cannot confirm the
hypothesis. The hypothesis that women would be significantly higher than men on the Relational Interdependent Self Construal scale was supported. However, the gender differences found on the Justice and Care subscales of the Moral Orientation Scale, although in the expected direction, were not significant.
When analyzed by race, the hypothesis that Black participants would score significantly higher on Relation than White participants was confirmed. However, this result was somewhat
complicated by the finding that the Black group also scored higher than the White group on the Autonomy subscale, although this difference was not found to be significant. The significant differences between Black and White scores on the RISC were in direct contrast to what was hypothesized, as the White group actually scored significantly higher on the RISC than the Black group. The hypotheses on the Moral Orientation Scale were confirmed for race: Whites scored significantly higher than Blacks on Justice, while Blacks scored significantly higher than Whites on Care. In the third and final analysis, examining race by gender, similar contradictory results were found. Within the White group, the significant gender difference that was found on the Relation subscale of the RBS was consistent with the hypothesis, as were the significant gender differences on the RISC scale. However, no other significant gender differences were found within the White group to support any of the other hypotheses. Similarly, none of the hypotheses were supported by the results according to gender differences within the Black group.
The finding that White women scored significantly lower than the other three groups (Black women, Black men and White men ) on Autonomy, and that White men scored significantly lower than all other groups on Relation, cannot confirm or disconfirm the predicted hypotheses with respect to gender by race differences. Similarly, given that the only significant difference between all four groups on RISC was that White women were higher than Black women, Black men and White men, there is little support for the predicted differences on this variable. Finally, the significantly higher scores of White men on Justice and of Black men on Care than all other groups lends only partial support to the hypothesized differences on the Moral Orientation Scale.
These results will be discussed in chapter five in terms of the main hypotheses outlined in chapter three and the literature reviewed in chapter two.