Children's concepts of their rights1

Abstract

A three‐level progression of children's concepts of their rights toward principled reasoning was proposed. It was hypothesized that children in higher school grades and of high‐SES backgrounds would be more likely to give high‐level responses and to advocate rights for children than would younger and lower‐status children. Ninety first, third, fifth, and seventh graders participated in semi‐structured interviews. On the bases of these interviews, the hypotheses concerning the effects of social class and developmental factors were confirmed at high levels of significance, with the exception being that High‐SES seventh graders tended to have more negative attitudes toward children's rights than lower‐class peers. Some potentially confounding variables, such as ethnic group and sex, were found not to contribute significantly to an explanation of the variance in children's concepts of their rights. Further research is needed to assess the impact of school climate.