Is Moral Knowledge a Mediator Between Moral Awareness and Moral Behavior? An Empirical Study Based on the Sports Practitioners in Southwestern China.

Purpose: The present study explored the influence mechanism of the organic part of moral quality by validating if moral knowledge mediates the relation between moral awareness and moral behavior. Design: The present study used randomly stratified sampling method to sample 1,140 Chinese sports practitioners in southwest China and administrated the self-composed sports practitioner moral quality (SPMQ) questionnaire to the subjects for data collection. In addition, the present study applied regression analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques to explore the relationships among moral awareness, moral knowledge, and moral behavior. Findings: The present study showed two major findings. First, the SPMQ questionnaire showed good internal consistency since the overall Cronbach's a coefficient is 0.85 and the corresponding values of three sub-dimension were over 0.60. Also, it showed that the instrument had good construct validity because all factor loadings were higher than 0.70, all average extracted variances were higher than 0.60, and all composite reliability coefficients were higher than 0.80. Second, the results showed that moral knowledge played intermediate role between moral awareness and moral behavior in the relationships among moral awareness, moral knowledge, and moral behavior. Practical implications: The study is one of the very few research that discuss the mechanism of moral quality from the perspective of the mediation, especially explore the potential mediation effect of moral knowledge in conjunction with the relevant theories and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]