Developmental Area Flashcards

Question

Outline the procedure of kohlbergs study?

Answer 1

Using 75 American boys *Participants were presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas in the form of short stories to solve. *The stories were to determine each participant’s stage of moral reasoning for each of25 moral concepts/aspects. *Aspects assessed included: -Motive Given for Rule Obedience or Moral Action Using different cultures *Taiwanese boys, aged 10-13, were asked about a story involving theft of food:“A man’s wife is starving to death but the store owner won’t give the man any food unless he can pay, which he can’t. Should he break in and steal some food? Why?” *Young boys in Great Britain, Canada, Mexico and Turkey were tested in a similar way

Answer 2

Each of Kohlberg’s six stages were shown as follows: 1: Obey rules to avoid punishment. 2: Conform to obtain rewards, have favours returned etc. 3. Conform to avoid disapproval, dislike by others. 4. Conform to avoid censure by legitimate authorities and resultant guilt. 5. Conform to maintain the respect of the impartial spectator judging in terms of community welfare. 6. Conform to avoid self-condemnation. -The value of a human life is confused with the value of physical objects and is based on the social status or physical attributes of its possessor -Cross-cultural findings: *Taiwanese boys aged 10-13 tended to give ‘classic’ Stage-2 responses. *Middle-class urban boys aged 10 in the US, Taiwan and Mexico showed the order of use of each stage to be the same as the order of its difficulty or maturity. *In the US, by age 16, Stage-6 was rarely used. At age 13, the good-boy, middle stage (Stage-3) was not used

Answer 3

*There is an invariant developmental sequence in an individual’s moral development. *Each stage of moral development comes one at a time and always in the same order. *An individual may stop at any given stage and at any age. *Moral development fits with Kohlberg’s stage-pattern theory. *There is a cultural universality of sequence of stages.

Answer 4

*Children’s moral judgements about lying and truth telling primarily rely on the extent to which a verbal statement differs from factuality and whether or not the lie is punished. Not until around 11 years of age do children begin to use the protagonist’s intention as the key factor of their moral judgements -Piaget -Kohlberg conducted cross-cultural research to support his theory of moral development, but did not specifically focus on the ‘art of lying’

Answer 5

*This study was conducted to bridge the gap between this literature by directly testing the posited effect of culture on children’s moral evaluations of lying and truth telling. *This study compares the moral judgements of Canadian children and Chinese children from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in situations in which pro- and antisocial actions were denied or acknowledged. *The original study contains a detailed justification for why Chinese children in the PRC were compared with children from the Western culture of Canada.

Answer 6

*This was a laboratory experiment which used an independent measures design. *The independent variables (IVs) were: (i) whether the participant heard the social story or the physical story (ii) whether the participant heard (prosocial) stories involving a child who intentionally carried out a good deed (a deed valued by adults in both countries) or (antisocial) stories involving a child who intentionally carried out a bad deed (a deed viewed negatively in both cultures). There were therefore four conditions: Prosocial Behaviour/Truth-Telling stories, Prosocial Behaviour/Lie-Telling stories, Antisocial Behaviour/TruthTelling stories, Antisocial Behaviour/Lie-Telling stories -The dependent variables (DVs) were: (i) the rating given to the story character’s deed (ranging between very, very good and very, very naughty) (ii) the rating given to what the character said (verbal statement) (ranging between very, very good and very, very naughty)

Answer 7

*120 Chinese children: 40 7-year-olds (M age = 7.5 years, 20 male, 20 female), 40 9-year-olds (M age = 9.4 years, 20 male, 20 female), and 40 11-year-olds (M age = 11.3years, 20 male, 20 female). They were recruited from elementary schools in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, a mediumsized city (provincial capital) in the PRC. *108 Canadian children: 36 7-year-olds, 20 male, 16 female), 40 9-year-olds, 24 male, 16 female), 32 11-year-olds, 11.5 years, 14 male, 18 female). They were recruited from elementary schools in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Like Hangzhou, Fredericton is a provincial capital but its population is considerably smaller than Hangzhou. *Although the socio-economic status of the Chinese children was not known, most Canadian children were from middle-class families.

Answer 8

* Half of the Chinese children participated in the social story condition and the other half were placed in the physical story condition. The children were randomly assigned to each condition. * From the Canadian sample: 19 7-year-olds, 20 9-year-olds and 17 11-year-olds were randomly assigned to the social story condition and the other children were assigned to the physical story condition.

Answer 9

*Participants were read four scenarios accompanied by illustrations, two prosocial, two antisocial. All 8 stories can be found in Appendix of the original article, however the ProsocialBehaviour/Lie-Telling story went as follows: Here is Alex. Alex’s class had to stay inside at recess time because of bad weather, so Alex decided to tidy up the classroom for his teacher. (Question 1: Is what Alex did good or naughty?) So Alex cleaned the classroom, and when the teacher returned after recess, she said to her students,“Oh, I see that someone has cleaned the classroom for me.”The teacher then asked Alex,“Do you know who cleaned the classroom?”Alex said to his teacher,“I did not do it.” (Question 2: Is what Alex did good or naughty?) - Participants were then read either the four social or four physical stories. The story’s‘deed’section was read first and then they would indicate their rating either verbally, non-verbally or both on the rating chart. -They were then read the second section of the story and would then indicate, in the same way, their rating for the character’s verbal statement. *The meaning of each symbol was repeated every time a question was asked. *The words‘good’ and‘naughty’, in the two questions were altered within subjects. *To control for order effects, for each condition, two orders of the four stories were first determined using a randomisation table. About half of the participants in each condition were read the stories in one predetermined order, and the other half were read them in the other order. *Participants were then involved in post-experimental discussions.

Answer 10

Prosocial Behaviour/Truth-Telling Situations- The age and culture main effects were significant with Canadian children at each age giving similar ratings to truth telling whereas Chinese children’s ratings became less positive as age increased. The condition main effect was not significant. Prosocial behaviour/Lie-Telling Situations: After partialing out the effect of, the age and culture main effects remained significant. The condition main effect was not significant. Only the interaction between age and culture was therefore significant. -Overall, Canadian children rated lie telling in this situation negatively but as age increased their ratings became somewhat less negative. -Overall, Chinese children’s ratings of lie telling in this situation changed from negative to positive as age increased. Antisocial Behaviour/Truth-Telling Situations: -Children from both cultures rated truth telling in this situation very positively. No main effect or interaction was significant. Antisocial behaviour/Lie-Telling Situations: The culture and conditions main effects were not significant. Only the interaction between age, culture and condition was significant. - Both Chinese and Canadian children rated lie telling negatively in this condition. -Overall, negative ratings increased with age, irrespective of culture. -Chinese 7-year-olds rated lie telling less negatively then older children in the physical story condition, whereas Canadian 7-year-olds rated lie telling less negatively than older children in the social story condition.

Answer 11

*In the realm of lying and truth telling, a close relationship between socio-cultural practices and moral judgements exists. *Specific social and cultural norms have an impact on children’s developing moral judgements, which in turn, are modified by age and experience in a particular culture. *Chinese children rate truth telling in prosocial situations less positively and lie telling in the same situations less negatively than Canadian children. *Both Chinese and Canadian children show similar moral evaluations of lie telling and truth telling related to antisocial behaviours

Answer 12

-Education -Child practices -Computer games -Child rating films

Answer 13

- many useful applications including child care and education -attempts to answer the nature nurture debate -uses a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods so will gain useful data. - can study participants over time to reduce participant variables

Answer 14

-research with children may arise ethical issues, such as consent and protection -using children as participants can highlight practical issues, such as making inferences from observed behaviour as they cant tell us - research may be constrained by time or culture sue to changes in early year environments and cultural differences in child rearing - samples are often small and may be unrepresentative