Development of social-moral reasoning among Kibbutz adolescents: A longitudinal cross-cultural study.

Abstract

The development of social-moral judgment among Israeli kibbutz adolescents was studied from the perspective of Kohlberg's theory of moral judgment development. The sample included 92 adolescents, 64 of whom were interviewed longitudinally over a two-to-nine year period. The study's purpose was to evaluate the validity of Kohlberg's model and measure in a cross-cultural context and to assess the cultural uniqueness of social-moral reasoning among kibbutzniks. The developmental findings strongly supported the validity of Kohlberg's structuraldevelopmental understanding of moral judgment. Stage change was found to be upward, gradual, and without significant regressions. Analyses also supported the internal consistency of the stages as operationally defined in the standardized scoring manual. There were no significant sex differences in moral development and fewer cultural differences than expected. Overall, the distribution of stage scores among the kibbutz subjects was unusually high when compared to the results of parallel studies in the United States and Turkey, the two previous longitudinal studies of moral judgment development that have used the standardized scoring system. The most important cultural variation involved the use of Stages 4/5 and 5. Whereas all of Kohlberg's stages were present among kibbutz members, not all elements of kibbutz postconventional reasoning were present in Kohlberg's model or scoring manual. In particular, the communal emphasis and collective moral principles of the kibbutz subjects were partially missed or misunderstood. This article presents the results of a longitudinal study of social-moral reasoning among Israeli adolescents. The research oh