Projects

Adolescents’ socio-moral self-concepts as gendered, age-related, and contextual

A large-scale, cross-sectional study among representative samples of 12 -, 15- and 17+ -year-old Finnish boys and girls

Researchers: Airi Hautamäki (University of Helsinki, Finland) & Jarkko Hautamäki (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Time span: 2000-2006

A sub-area to the project: “The L-factor – Learning-to-Learn at school: A key to life-long learning?

Project leader: Jarkko Hautamäki, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki

In collaboration with Peter Heymans, University of Utrecht and Andrei Podolskij, University of Moscow

PROBLEM: The adolescent is faced with socialization pressures to construct multiple selves associated with different roles in various social contexts, e.g., parents, school, peers. These demands conspire with the early adolescent’s entry into the stage of Formal Operations which should equip, at least a portion of the adolescents with the hypothetico-deductive skills to create a more formal theory of the self (i.e., coherently organized, internally consistent, empirically valid, Harter 1999). Thus, it may be assumed that the self-structure grows increasingly differentiated, contextual, as well as hierarchically ordered (Shavelson & Marsh 1986; Harter 1999) across adolescence.

METHODS: On the basis of large-scale cross-sectional studies among representative samples of Finnish adolescents (three data sets: 12-year-old pupils=2894; 15-year-old pupils=2823; 17+-year-old students=3093), the project focused on the question, how the adolescents construct their socio-moral self-concept in various contexts across different substages of adolescence. The Moral Self-Complexity Scale (Linville 1987), used, for example, in Russian (Vidnoij) (Brugman et al. 2003) was applied assessing the socio-moral self-concept of the adolescents, i.e., how the adolescents assessed themselves as moral and socially interconnected persons in four contexts, being alone, at school, with parents and peers. The self-report test consisted of 24 items concerning attributes of a moral nature. The subjects were asked to assess themselves for each attribute on a 5-point Likert scale in four different contexts. Some of the 24 descriptors were highly socio-morally saturated, allowing skewed and peaked distributions. The major context for assessment was the school, but additional contexts are needed in order to relate the school as an learning environment to other ‘developmentally relevant settings of significant others’, in terms of a post-vygotskian framework.

The instrument also yielded information of the degree to which respondents assigned different values to the same moral attribute of the self across various contexts.

RESULTS: Firstly, the project dealt with the age effect, particularly the growing importance of the acceptance of the peer group. With age, adolescents reported significantly higher socio-moral scores with their peers than with their parents or at school. Secondly, gender differences in regard to the gradual organisation of the socio-moral self were assumed on the basis of research concerning the greater importance of relationships for adolescent girls than boys (Chodorow 1989; Gilligan 1982; Harter 1999; Miller 1990; Stein, Newcomb & Bentler 1992). There were marked gender differences, female adolescents assessing themselves as the most well-behaved in public contexts. Additionally, the differences between the self-assessed public moral behaviour and the self-assessed authentic moral self increased with age for girls, in terms of Gilligan (1990) the genuine self went underground? But for both boys and girls, self alone (as an indicator of the authentic self) overlapped most with values of self with the parents and self at school, and the least with values of self with friends.

Thirdly, the degree of the differentiation of the socio-moral self-concept was assumed to be related to the level of thinking, as the entry into the period of formal operational thinking, in principle, makes possible that the self as a cognitive construction has the attributes of a formal theory (Harter 1999). More efficiently thinking (as measured by a deductive reasoning test, Ross & Ross 1977) adolescents reported the highest moral values in public contexts, the least efficiently thinking the lowest values at school or among friends. Thus, efficient thinking seemed to be connected to perceiving more adequately the role expectations of public contexts, i.e., enabling more flexible coping with a diversity of social roles (Linville 1987), and higher self-monitoring (Snyder 1987).

DISCUSSION: With age, there was a decrease in the overlap of the self-reported values of the socio-moral self across different contexts offering support to the stance of the multiple, contextually emerging selves (Gergen 1991). The results may be interpreted and discussed from the stance of both unified and multiple selves, and meta-narratives of Late Modernity. E.g., is the false-self behaviour during adolescence an example of role experimentation (Erikson 1968; Marcia 1980; Selman 1980)? Or is it an indication of a gradual shift in social character occurring in late modern times (Bauman 1995; Giddens 1991), i.e., a shift from the “inner-directed”, self-determined and principled individual, true to himself, to the “outer-directed” social chameleon (Riesman 1950), i.e., the “saturated self”, as termed and analysed by Gergen (1991)? The adolescents are just learning flexible and adaptive moral behaviour in accordance with contextually varying social scripts, as self-complexity and self-monitoring increases? This raises the question: How should moral behaviour be reframed in the context of contextual selves, as classic, developmental psychological theories of moral reasoning (Kohlberg 1976; Walker 1988; 1991), in fact, take the stance of a unified self?