Adolescents' moral dilemmas: The context

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology which outlines the kinds of real-life moral dilemmas adolescents spontaneously present in open-ended semiclinical interviews. A coding procedure is introduced which delineates three aspects of these moral dilemmas, “conflicts,” “context,” and “content,” and an analysis is done of the category labeled “context.” One hundred forty-eight adolescents from two school settings were interviewed. The results show that the majority of both boys and girls in these samples describe moral conflicts in the “context” of a relationship, particularly involving friends. However, boys are more likely than girls to focus on the “the self” as the “context” of the moral dilemma with no other relational context present and significantly more girls than boys focus on relationships rather than self.