The comparison of real-life moral reasoning with hypothetical moral reasoning of children about their spontaneous physically aggressive behaviors

This study was undertaken to compare children's moral reasoning about real-life behaviors and parallel hypothetical situations. A recently developed rating scale by Eisenberg-Berg and Neal (l979) was used in this study to categorize moral reasoning elicited in children based on probe questioning.

A class of twenty-one kindergarten children was observed over a twelve-week period for spontaneous physically aggressive behaviors. The observer categorized these behaviors into one of five physically aggressive behavior types, then used probe questioning to elicit moral reasoning responses from the subjects justifying their own physically aggressive behaviors. These responses were descriptively recorded by the observer for rater use. Following the real-life observations, each participating subject was presented a maximum of five hypothetical stories. Moral reasoning justifications were elicited through probe questioning and responses were descriptively recorded by the observer, again, for later use. Raters categorized both the real-life and hypothetical moral reasoning categories in order to determine the consistency among subject justifications. Only ratings with at least two-thirds rater agreement were used in the data analysis.

Data were analyzed by percentage agreement between real-life and hypothetical moral justifications. In addition, the probability of agreement between both real-life and hypothetical moral justifications of preschool children was calculated for each justification category. When comparing the real-life moral reasoning and the hypothetical moral reasoning of preschool children, the major conclusion of the study is that preschool children predominantly used pragmatic moral justifications for their own spontaneous physical aggressions in both real-life and hypothetical situations.