This study identifies three conceptual domains in which children make sociomoral judgments and analyzes the judgments in varying contexts. The study employed rating scales and interview methods with 321 children between the ages of four and 11 to determine (a) to what extent children make a conceptual distinction among events in the moral, socioconventional, and personal domains and (b) how they judge more complex situations in relation to characteristics of the domains.
Children made judgments concerning the seriousness, rule contingency, authority dictates, and rule generalizability for fifteen transgressions common in preschool and elementary school settings. Children’s justifications for their judgments of the transgressions were also assessed.
It was found that children of all ages, in general, ranked moral transgressions as more serious than socioconventional violations. Socioconventional violations, in turn, were ranked as more serious than violations in the personal domain. However, kindergarten children did not make a clear distinction between the moral and the socioconventional domain, though they made a distinction between the moral and the personal domain. Third grade and sixth grade children made distinctions among three domains : the moral, the socioconventional, and the personal.
Moreover, moral events were less likely than socioconventional and personal events to be regraded as contingent on the presence of a rule and relative to a social context.
In examining the effects of situational complexity, it was found that children evaluated events having moral consequences as more serious than events having social consequences or moral causes. They evaluated events as less objectionable if the violator’s reasons related to the moral domain.
Justifications given for evaluations of events were consistent with the characteristics of the moral, socioconventional, and personal domains. Moreover, the study indicated that children’s ability to differentiate domains and apply domain characteristics to more complex situations increases with age. The findings are discussed in relation to a developmental differentiation and conceptual domains approach to sociomoral development .