Peens B J, Louw D A
Centre for Behavioural Sciences, University of South Africa, Orange Free State Bloemfontein.
Med Law. 2000;19(3):591-612.
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.
儿童对自身权利的推理在很大程度上取决于他们的发展水平。由于权利推理本质上涉及道德问题，将上述发展过程置于情境中的最佳基础是考虑一种道德发展方法。在这方面，科尔伯格的道德发展理论已被发现是研究人员所依据的主要理论。本文聚焦于一项对312名不同年龄、文化和语言群体的南非儿童进行的关于他们道德发展水平和权利推理的实证调查。所使用的两份问卷分别是科尔伯格的标准问题得分（B表）和梅尔顿的儿童权利访谈。最重要的研究发现是，对于这项南非研究，科尔伯格的普遍性理论、不变的顺序以及其对性别和文化的适用性得到了证实。此外，权利推理发展与道德伦理发展水平之间存在重要关联，这意味着它们之间存在相互依存的关系。
