Harry, the question about young people's constructions suggests that
there may be an area of investigation relevant both to research in PCP and
work in developmental psych and moral reasoning. For example, the finding that
children, (at an earlier age than the Piaget/Kohlberg school had imagined) are
able to distinguish moral issues from conventional ones (e.g., hurting someone
physically versus using your fingers to eat noodles).
With adolescence, these values seem to go through a period of diffusion --
probably due to the superordinate influence of the peer group at this time
(along with puberty) only to emerge as three quite distinct domains by
young adulthood: Personal, Conventional, and Moral.
A reference on the above triad is Turiel et al. (1991) [SRCD Monographs];
IMHO, it also is research that could be elaborated further with grid methods.
For example,
Turiel found that there were certain topics (particularly issues such as
abortion, pornography, & homosexuality) where people interviewed disagreed
in how these three domains were applicable or even defined. This seems to
me a worthy research project wherein social issues of the day are used
as elements in a grid with following supplied constructs (rated or bipolar):
VERY MORAL NOT VERY MORAL
VERY PERSONAL NOT VERY PERSONAL
VERY CONVENTIONAL NOT VERY CONVENTIONAL
[BTW, If necessary, the word conventional could be interchanged with
"Socially Sanctioned" without losing much meaning in the translation]
Such a grid, where the elements are some emotionally charged "nonprotoypical"
events, might show that the construals people make of moral issues can be
understood with pcp as a base and mainstream theory as the grail.
Any thoughts on this will be appreciated. Hemant Desai
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