Middle school students' engagement in and beliefs about student misbehavior: A social domain approach

Through the lens of social domain theory, the present study examined how 7th grade students coordinated social and moral reasoning when thinking about transgressions.

Eighty-nine 7th-grade students (Mean_age = 13.05 years; 46 female students) were sampled to assess their beliefs about and engagement in school and classroom misbehavior. Interactive sorting tasks were employed to examine how participants coordinated competing social concerns inherent in everyday misbehaviors.

Analyses revealed that engagement and reasoning were domain differentiated; students engaged most in conventional and contextually conventional transgressions and least in transgressions that involved harm to others (moral) or to the self (prudential). Sorting task responses revealed that, over and above domain-consistent reasoning (e.g., moral reasoning used to justify decisions about moral transgressions), students appealed to conventional justifications like teacher authority, school rules, and peer norms when reasoning about all types of misbehavior (i.e., moral, conventional, contextually conventional, and prudential). Reasoning also differed by misbehavior groupings. Analyses also indicated that the number of social cognitive domains that a participant considered relevant when defining a transgression was negatively associated with engagement in that transgression. Finally, a multigroup path analysis model revealed that the association between type of reasoning and misbehavior was moderated by misbehavior group.

The findings from this study increased understanding of the ways that individuals coordinate social and moral concerns in everyday decision making. Moreover, discussion focused on how the results can be used to support domain-based values education and in more effective teacher/administrator responses to student misbehavior.