How to Form Research Questions on Moral Development
As a researcher in the social sciences, your role is to ask questions that get at the heart of how human beings learn, grow, and influence each other's behavior. One of the most important fields of social scientific research is moral development. How do children learn the difference between right and wrong and who do they learn it from? What factors do culture, ethnicity, class and gender play in the acquisition of moral traits? What accounts for the variation in moral systems between cultures and historical eras? Here are a few suggestions.
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Instructions
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Use the "primary colors" theory of moral traits. Steven Pinker of MIT has identified five basic traits of morality: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity. Questions can be designed to elucidate which of these traits are prioritized in a given situation and to show how conflicts between them tend to be resolved. For instance, one possible question might encode the conflict between preventing harm and group loyalty by posing a scenario in which children must decide between helping a group of close allies meet its goals (i.e. earning a special trip) and allowing some small degree of harm to be suffered by a stranger outside of the group.
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Identify sources of authority in the development of moral reasoning. A starting hypothesis might be that children make moral decisions based in part on a hierarchy of authoritative figures -- teachers, parents, religious leaders, civil authorities, media personalities, older siblings, etc. -- and that in any given moral dilemma they must go through a process of determining which is the appropriate figure to obey. Questions might try to get at the process of selection to find out how, when, and to whom moral authority is granted.
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Investigate the impact of culture. One idea would be to design a cross-cultural comparison study that looks at social and economic factors in moral development. For instance, you could begin with the hypothesis that industrialized cultures tend to value fairness more than loyalty. The study would need to quantify data from a cross-section of industrialized and pre-industrial cultures, focusing on: a) whether economic factors affect the "threshold" of perceptions of unfairness (in a classroom or game) and b) whether this bears a connection to positive or negative perceptions of loyalty (for instance, to the negative perception of being overly loyal to authority, i.e., a "teacher's pet.")
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