Conceptions of moral, social-conventional, and personal events among Chinese preschoolers in Hong Kong.

Full Abstract

Sixty-one Chinese preschoolers from Hong Kong at 2 ages (Ms = 4.36 and 6.00 years) were interviewed about familiar moral, social-conventional, and personal events. Children treated personal events as distinct from moral obligations and conventional regulations. Children judged the child as deciding personal issues, based on personal choice justifications, whereas children judged parents as deciding moral and conventional issues. With age, children granted increased decision-making power to the child. In contrast, children viewed moral transgressions as more serious, generalizably wrong, and wrong independent of authority than other events, based on welfare and fairness. Punishment-avoidance justifications for conventional events decreased with age, whereas conventional justifications increased. Young Chinese preschool children make increasingly differentiated judgments about their social world.

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Author information

Author/s: Yau, Jenny (J); Smetana, Judith G (JG);

Affiliation: Department of Education: Educational Foundations and Leadership, George Fox University, USA.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Child development (Child Dev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: -2003 May-Jun; vol 74 (issue 3) : pp 647-58

Dates: Created 2003/06/10; Completed 2003/10/10; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12795382, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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