Moral development of chinese students in Hong Kong

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) of moral judgment by Rest was administered to 242 Chinese secondary school and university students in Hong Kong. Metric unfolding analysis on the stage scores of different groups of both sexes and various educational levels revealed that the moral development of the Chinese students were in agreement with Kohlberg's major distinctions of preconventional, conventional and postconventional levels. The sequence of stage development within the same level (e.g., between stages 5 and 6), however, was sometimes ambiguous. Results also showed that older university students were morally more mature than the younger secondary school students in their P%, D, and stages 5 and 6 scores. The applicability of DIT in the Chinese culture and the universality of Kohlberg's 6-stage model were generally supported.