A Delphi Technique in Confirming the Evaluation Model of the Stories Containing Moral Dilemmas based on Emotional Scales

In line with new findings in the interdisciplinary fields of philosophy and psychology of emotions and cognition, the use of emotional scales in assessing readers’ reactions to the texts containing moral dilemmas has attracted the attention of researchers. Likewise, this study, using the Delphi technique and the opinions of experts tried to predict the emotional-cognitive reactions of two groups of deontic and consequentialist readers to the texts containing moral dilemmas. For this purpose, a mixed-methods research was chosen and a three-phase Delphi technique was used for collecting the data, i.e., experts’ opinions. The expert group consisted of nine university English teachers and psychologists fluent in English. First, the experts were provided with six strategic questions to be able to comment. After coding and converting the qualitative data into quantitative data and preparing a concept map, first, the percentage of the pairwise agreement between the raters was calculated, and then, the formulas of Krippendorff’s alpha and Fleiss Kappa were used to determine the reliability of the 72 pairs of decisions. Accordingly, the acceptable values ​​of 0.76, 0.72, and 0.71 were obtained for the mentioned formulas. Based on the results of the two stages of the Delphi technique, a 9-point Likert scale questionnaire was developed and re-assessed by the experts. After rating the questionnaire items by the experts, the intra-class correlation coefficient with the two-way random effect model was used. A significant value of 0.872 was obtained from this calculation, which confirmed the congruence of experts’ opinions about the probable behaviors of the two groups of readers in reaction to the texts containing ethical dilemmas. This should be noted that the collection of experts’ opinions and the evaluation of the reliability of the opinions, in three consecutive rounds, took about four months.