Children's rights: reasoning and their level of moral development: an empirical investigation

Children's reasoning about their rights is largely determined by their level of development. Since rights-reasoning concerns essentially moral issues, the best foundation to contextualise the developmental process mentioned would be to consider a moral-developmental approach. In this regard Kohlberg's theory of moral development has been found to be the primary theory that researchers have built on. The article focuses on an empirical investigation done with 312 South African children of varying ages, cultures and language groups into their level of moral-development and rights-reasoning. The two questionnaires used were Kohlberg's Standard Issue Score (Form B) and Melton's Children's Rights Interview. The most important findings made were that Kohlberg's theory of universalizability and unvariant order of sequence along with its applicability to gender and culture was confirmed for this South African study. Furthermore an important correlation between rights-reasoning development and level of moral ethical development was made which implies that an interdependent relationship exists between them.