Using moral dilemmas to evaluate adolescents’ moral reasoning: an experience with the structured dilemma

Our research was developed with two different purposes, the first being the theoretical interest in the moral reasoning and judgment processes, and whether the development of these processes can be influenced by social and cultural variables; the second being a methodological issue concerning the possibility of finding a different way of obtaining quantitative measures of individual differences in moral development. We therefore built a 65-item questionnaire based on a moral dilemma with a lower level of abstractness compared to the Kohlberg and Rest dilemmas, and we tested it on a group of 51 adolescents involved in social care activities and on another group of non-social volunteer adolescents. Results show a significative difference in 6 items of the questionnaire concerning different areas. The goals of this work are twofold: first, attention is given to the study of the development of moral reasoning processes; secondly, we construed a moral dilemma test used on a group of teenagers engaged in social care, compared to a control group. We assume that the experimental group may reach higher score levels in the areas investigated by the test regarding the moral approach to the presented dilemma, and we also assume that a more concrete dilemma, as the chosen one in our questionnaire, may be more appropriate to test adolescents’ level of moral reasoning. Following Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory (Kolberg & Lickona. 1976), moral reasoning can be explained in terms of development of moral stages during the life span. Kohlberg developed a peculiar technique to test and evaluate these stages with structured interviews based on moral dilemmas. For the author this methodology was a valid way to take a valuable measure of the moral reasoning level. Kohlberg’s research was mainly carried out with children and adolescents. A relevant complement of this theory was developed by Rest (Rest, 1987), who built a moral dilemma based test (DIT) with the purpose to obtain more accurate measures of moral development from adolescence to adulthood. This test is also implemented on moral dilemmas and uses a 5-point Likert scale to obtain quantitative scores of moral reasoning. The Kohlberg and Rest’s theorethical and methodological perspectives were criticized by Siegal (1982) regarding the difficoult to put subjects in just one stage of reasoning and also the problem to clarly define the moral stage boundaries. Another relevant point of view was addressed by Gick (2003) in relationship with the moral relativity that is deeply influenced by the society in general and by the specific situation in witch the subject plays a main role with his actions and perceptions. We tried to build a bridge between the classic assumptions and these new suggestions. We implemented our background with the Theory of Planned Behavior/Reasoned action originally developed by Ajzen (1991) and adapted to social and group contexts, in relation with social norm violations by Terry et al. (1999) and the complex relationship between moral reasoning and moral behaviour (Birch, 1997). We also considered the Social-Cognitive Theory of Albert Bandura and particularly the construct of “moral disengagement” ( Bandura; 1986, 1989, 1999). The aim was the necessity to reduce the abstract level of the moral dilemmas from a never-experienced situation to a more concrete and experience-based situation that can be encountered by a high-school student in everyday life. Furthermore we took in account the Eisenberg approach (Eisenberg, 1987; Eisemberh & Fabes, 1991) to select the questionnaire dimensions, highlighting the aspects linked to pro-social behaviour, and the role-taking skills.