Character climate scale: Development and multi-site validation of a new tool for measuring the moral ecosystem of a university

Abstract

Virtue science has expanded in recent decades but has focused largely on individual-level measurement, overlooking the environments that shape character formation. To address this gap, we developed and validated the Character Climate Scale (CCS) to assess the moral ecology of higher education settings. Across four studies (N > 1,400) at three U.S. institutions, the CCS was developed and refined to capture students’ perceptions of their university’s moral ecology as expressed through peers, professors, courses, extra-curricular activities, and personal experiences. The CCS demonstrated strong psychometric performance, including a stable general factor and five-factor structure, internal consistency, test—retest reliability, and convergent, discriminant, and concurrent criterion validity. The final 23-item CCS offers a robust, practical tool for assessing and tracking the moral ecology of educational environments. It also enables institutions to evaluate virtue-development efforts, identify strengths and growth areas, and monitor change over time, advancing virtue science by situating moral development within its environmental context.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Moral Education, 2026 · DOI ↗