Family, Life Course, and Society Commons^™

Moral Versus Social-Conventional Reasoning: A Narrative And Cultural Critique, Carol S. Witherell, Carolyn P. Edwards

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Abstract: We suggest in this paper that attempts to segregate social-conventional reasoning from the moral domain may represent an artifactual division, one that ignores major philosophic and psychological traditions and cultural constructs regarding the moral self. We address such issues as the individual, social, and relational dimensions of morality; the cultural context of moral development and behavior; and whether morality is solely a matter of justice, harm and welfare considerations, or concerned as well with culturally variable definitions of the good and the good society, with role obligations, and with caring and affective aspects of human experience. We conclude with …

Teachers' Expectations About The Timing Of Developmental Skills: A Cross-Cultural Study, Carolyn P. Edwards, Lella Gandini

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Today, in the United States, teachers often need to understand what behaviors are normal in terms of children's cultural background. To understand children, teachers of course must have authentic respect for cultural diversity. But they also need something more: depth of knowledge about child development so they know what to expect of children of a given age. Teachers hold internal guidelines regarding many behaviors, but to what degree are they objective standards that can be applied to all children? How much, instead, do they reflect unconscious cultural biases? In recent years, we have begun to find out more about people’s …

The Age Group Labels And Categories Of Preschool Children, Carolyn P. Edwards

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Questions of how young children use “age” groups to understand the social world led to 2 studies exploring the content of preschool children’s age group labels and categories. Study 1 included 32 children aged 2-4 years and determined spontaneous labels for both photographs and dolls representing the life span. Results indicated that children readily labeled all ages using a relatively limited set of terms, but showed less patterned labeling of stimuli representing adults than children. Girls’ labels were more structured than boys’. Older preschoolers showed more differentiated structures than did younger ones and used more kinship terms as labels. Study …

Talking With Young Children About Social Ideas, Carolyn P. Edwards, Mary Ellin Logue, Anna Sargent Russell

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

During the early childhood years, children’s understanding of many social and moral issues undergoes immense changes. We became interested in learning more about these changes and supporting them through our laboratory preschool curriculum. One major change, for example, is that children come to classify themselves and others into sex, age, and kinship categories and to learn social role expectations. Children also show greatly deepened understanding of such moral issues as fair sharing, obedience, authority, and friendship.

These areas of development are part of what can be called social cognition, or “children’s understanding of social behavior—what children think about their own …

Social Roles And Moral Reasoning: A Case Study In A Rural African Community, Sara Harkness, Carolyn P. Edwards, Charles Super

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

This study explores relationships among moral reasoning (as measured by the Kohlberg scale of moral development), social roles, and cultural context among the elders in a small, traditional Kipsigis community of western Kenya. Six traditional leaders—men who were considered morally outstanding by their neighbors and who were frequently called on to help settle local disputes—were interviewed, using an adapted version of the Kohlberg moral dilemmas; six men who were similar to the leaders in age, education, religion, and wealth but who were not considered moral leaders were also interviewed. The leaders scored slightly but significantly higher than the nonleaders on …

Social Experience And Moral Judgment In East African Young Adults, Carolyn P. Edwards

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

Relationships between stage of moral judgment and antecedent social experiences are presented for a non-Western sample of young adults. Crosssectional data are presented for two groups of Kenyan students: 52 University of Nairobi students; and 40 fourth form secondary school Ss. Critical variables are (a) family modernization, (b) attending ethnically pluralistic secondary schools, and (c) living independently away from home. The correlations between moral judgment stage and these three variables are controlled for, and compared to, correlations between stage of moral judgment and age, sex, race, and academic ability (as measured by standardized achievement tests or by grades). The …