Investigating new Ways to Study Adolescent Moral Competence

Abstract

To explore adolescent moral development and moral competence it is important to develop an instrument, which would make a moral dilemma content explicit for subjects and assist adolescents to make a proper decision. We suppose that a specially designed movie could be used as a tool for representing a moral dilemma core to develop essential motivation and inclusion of viewers in the presented task, to present a realistic content of the problem situation and to present the context of this situation as a whole, and finally to make explicit the emotional peculiarities of the situation. The new method to assess adolescent moral competence has been tested in few secondary schools of Moscow, Russia in 2002-2004 (participants’ age 13 – 16 y.o., N=250). It has been found that this new method allowed to objectify the content of a moral dilemma much more effectively than a traditional, written manner did and consequently revealed more adequately the level of adolescents’ moral competence.