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Article Excerpt
Two children's conversations with adults were examined for reference to moral issues using transcripts of archived at-home family talk from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database (MacWhinney, 2000). Through target words (e.g., good, wrong, mean) in transcripts of two children between ages 2.5 and 5.0 years, 1,333 moral conversations were identified. Conversations were examined for whether and when children discussed moral issues, how they used moral words (e.g., to communicate feelings, ask for reasons, etc.), what was discussed and in what contexts, and whether children were active or passive contributors. The resulting case study portraits of early moral sensibility extend and challenge extant findings, revealing substantive differences between the two children's moral sensibilities as well as commonalities, including a tendency to be active rather than passive in moral conversation, to focus on the dispositions/ behaviors of others, and to engage in moral conversation primarily to give/ask for reasons, communicate feelings, and (dis)approve.
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Research has revealed much about the moral life of young children. We have learned that even young children distinguish between moral and social/conventional rules (Killen, 1991; Smetana, 1983; Smetana & Braeges, 1990; Turiel, 1983), feel empathy and engage in prosocial behaviors toward others (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987; Hoffman, 2000; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, & King, 1979), are aware of household rules and standards (Dunn, 1987; Lamb, 1991), engage in tattling (den Bak & Ross, 1996) and other forms of conflict resolution (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; Howe, Rinalidi, Jennings, & Petrakos, 2002; Rinaldi & Howe, 2003), and are interested in issues of distributive justice (Damon, 1977). These are important discoveries, yet we still lack a comprehensive portrayal of early moral life from the child's perspective. What are the salient features of a young child's daily moral landscape? Is a young child concerned from day to day with the wide range of issues that concern adults, such as justice, empathy, prosocial action, virtues, and principles, or are the child's issues more limited? Does the moral landscape, viewed in this way, change during early childhood? Does it differ between individuals and between contexts? We have yet to explore the broad topography of a single child's early moral sensibility in this way.
The area of moral development arguably lacks the case study--style portrayals that have figured historically in other areas of psychological development, but a potential window on early moral sensibility is children's conversation, substantial collections of which are now readily available in computerized databases. And although caution is warranted in assuming that talk mirrors understanding, recent investigations in other areas of social cognition have demonstrated not only that young children understand much about interpersonal communication (e.g., Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; Garvey & Hogan, 1973) but also that exploration of children's earliest utterances can reveal much about their interests and beliefs (e.g., Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Dunn, 1987; Hickling & Wellman, 2001). Insofar as conversation is an effective medium for socialization (Miller, 1994; Miller & Hoogstra, 1992; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984), it seems likely that children's conversations about moral issues constitute an important window on early moral sensibility, just as they have provided insights into other aspects of children's social cognition, such as their understanding of mental states (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995), of causation in human behavior (Hickling & Wellman, 2001), of emotion (Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002), and of the distinction between reality and appearance (Woolley & Wellman, 1990).
To be sure, researchers of early moral development have also employed natural language analysis. For instance, examinations of parent-child conversations have shown that by 2 years of age, children openly communicate about obligation and blame with respect to both others' feelings and familial/ social rules (Dunn, 1987), that they focus more on others' (e.g., a sibling's) transgression than their own (Dunn & Munn, 1986; Ross & den Bak-Lammers, 1998), and that bringing the parent's attention to such transgressions, both to receive parental support and to enforce social/moral standards, increases in the preschool years (den Bak & Ross, 1996). Yet although parent-child conversations have been examined for evidence concerning the development of specific moral phenomena--for example, tattling between siblings (den Bak & Ross, 1996) and awareness of social/moral standards (Dunn 1987; Lamb, 1991)--they have been less frequently studied with regard to early moral sensibility, generally speaking. Snow's (1987) pioneering analysis of one child's moral use of three target words (good, bad, should) from 2.6 to 6.1 years old most closely approximates what we have in mind. Snow's analysis showed, among other things, that "good" and "bad" were used in moral contexts to refer to human actions (e.g., "that was a good thing to do"), human spiritual states (e.g., "you're being a good boy"), and products of the human mind (e.g., "those are bad ideas"). Specifically, the semantic domains that seemed most morally salient were good/bad people, good/bad ideas, and good/bad words. Yet Snow's investigation was preliminary in several respects, analyzing only three target words as they appeared in the conversations of one child and employing a coding scheme that targeted three primary questions: who introduces morality as a topic of conversation, how frequent such conversations are, and how much information parents provide children about moral issues.
There is much yet to be learned about young children's awareness (and negotiation) of the moral domain through an in-depth exploration of their earliest adult-child conversations. The extant questions are many: What moral issues do young children notice and talk about (e.g., feelings, welfare/needs, rules/standards, obedience, principles)? What sorts of "moral" words (e.g., good, bad, right, wrong) do they use, and how do they use them (e.g., to disapprove, to ask for reasons, to elicit sympathy)? How do young children engage in conversations about moral issues, that is, do children introduce moral issues for discussion or simply respond to adult leads? And finally, do children's moral arena change over time? To begin to address these questions, we conducted a longitudinal exploration of two young children's everyday moral discourse. In focusing on two children, we limited our ability to generalize beyond them and aimed instead to achieve for each child a portrait, both comprehensive and in-depth, of early moral sensibility.
Method
Overview and Rationale
We examined archived transcripts for two children, Abe (Kuczaj, 1976) and Sarah (Brown, 1973), from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) on-line database (MacWhinney, 2000), a collection of natural-language transcripts contributed by numerous researchers. We focused on the at-home conversations of these two children, sampled periodically between ages 2 and 5 years. To locate conversations about moral issues in an efficient manner, we followed other researchers (e.g., Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Hickling & Weliman, 2001; Snow, 1987) in first identifying target words (e.g., good, bad, right, wrong, kind, mean) and then examining a window of conversation centered on each target word use. This method, although efficient, is adequate only insofar as the target words successfully pinpoint the conversations of interest. To ensure an adequate index, we undertook an extensive preliminary study to select the relevant target words utilizing transcripts from several children from the database.
Target Word Selection
Defining moral conversations. As our primary aim was to describe the breadth and depth of two individual children's early moral sensibility, we assumed a broad definition of morality. We chose target words that would index conversations involving reference to the well-being of (or harm to) individuals, animals, or objects; to people's qualities, dispositions, or actions related to such well-being (or harm); and to rules, expectations, reasons for, or feelings about such issues.
Selecting words. Guided by this broad construal of morality, we began our search for target words by reading samples of transcripts for three children (representing ages 2-5 years) selected from the CHILDES database: Abe (Kuczaj, 1976), Adam (Brown, 1973), and Nathan (contributed by Catherine Snow). Transcripts reflecting approximately one month's worth of recorded discussion within each six-month period were reviewed by the first author (amounting to 185 single-spaced pages of transcripts for Abe, 240 for Nathan, and 287 for Adam). Conversations pertinent to moral issues, as defined above, were noted in these transcripts, and child and adult uses of key moral words (e.g., good/bad, right/wrong, nice/mean, friend, etc.) were identified. This preliminary reading resulted in a list of potential target moral words to which we added words that we encountered in other moral development studies and children's literature as well as a few suggested to us by colleagues. The resulting list contained 98 potential target words (see Appendix). To facilitate later description of what aspects of morality featured in children's early moral sensibility, we grouped these words loosely (although not necessarily exclusively) into the following categories: words indicating moral evaluation (e.g., good, bad, right, wrong); moral (deontic) expectations/obligations (e.g., should, must, rule); moral emotions/internal states (e.g., love, sympathy, shame); moral actions (e.g., hit, hurt, help); moral traits/virtues (e.g., brave, gentle, honest); and other (e.g., war, peace, gift). Having identified key words for flagging discussions concerning a range of moral issues, we conducted frequency analyses of child and adult uses of all forms of each word (e.g., love, loved, loves, loving) in the transcripts from Abe and Sarah. Words not employed in either set of transcripts were dropped from the target word list. The final list consisted of 77 words, which were used 12,343 times across both sets of transcripts (see Appendix).
Children Selected for Study
Abe (Kuczaj, 1976) and Sarah (Brown, 1973) were the children whose transcripts from the CHILDES database were selected for a comprehensive examination. Abe's corpora included 210 transcribed audiotaped at-home conversations, recorded by Abe's father during 1973-1975, 1 hour per week from 2.4 to 4.0 years and one-half hour per week from 4.1 to 5.0 years. Sarah's corpora included 139 transcribed audiotaped at-home conversations, recorded by researchers present on site between 1963 and 1966 for one-half hour once or twice...
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