Scholars have found that while women across cultures do on average 66% of all household labor, only 20-30% of women find these gendered distributions unfair. As scholars concerned with moral development, gender equality, and household functioning, we need to study the processes underlying the observed tension between the apparent inequality in housework distribution and the belief by family members that such distribution is fair and acceptable. A limitation of previous research has been that scholars mainly focused on only one of the members of a household’s evaluations of gendered housework and primarily concentrated their research within the United States. In order to address these methodological limitations, this dissertation employed interviews, surveys, and observations of family meal preparations to investigate all the members of 12 Chinese and 12 South Korean families’ social and moral reasoning about their own households’ labor distribution. Furthermore, the home is where children first begin to learn about issues of justice and gender. Therefore, developmental implications were explored through interviews and surveys with133 children, half from each country, investigating how they made sense of their homes’ division of housework as well as their developing understandings of fairness.

Consistent with previous research, mothers in both countries were reported as doing the majority of housework. As anticipated, Korean mothers were reported as spending more time on housework than Chinese mothers. In line with this finding, Korean children and parents were statistically more likely to find their own family’s division as unfair compared to Chinese participants. However, consistent with previous findings, only 39.58% of parents in both countries found their own family’s division as unfair. Surprisingly, while the great majority of children (81.2%) found a hypothetical scenario in which the mother did the majority of housework as unfair, children were split when it came to evaluating their own household, and only 47.7% of children found their family’s division unfair. Interestingly, no gender differences in fairness evaluations were found. Unexpectedly, interviews revealed that 20.83% of parents found their division neither fair nor unfair, and instead believed that it was reasonable. Thematic analysis of family interviews revealed that many parents in both countries did not believe that fairness should be used to evaluate a family’s division of housework. However, both children and adults who evaluated their division as fair were more likely to employ time-availability as a rationale for why mothers did more housework.

This study’s findings have several implications. One, children in both countries did not significantly differ from their parents in how they perceived the amount of each family member’s involvement in their family’s housework distribution. Two, equity served as a justification for considering smaller proportions of inequality fair, while larger inequalities were considered unfair. Therefore, rather than relying on conventional norms to accept inequality, individuals employed moral justifications in their evaluations of the fairness of a gender unequal household labor division. Three, children’s and adults’ evaluations and reasoning regarding hypothetical scenarios differed significantly from their assessments regarding their own family’s situation. This suggests the need for future research to go beyond relying on only hypothetical scenarios to investigate individual’s evaluations of social issues, since individuals may be less morally critical of real situations than previously suggested from studies relying solely on moral evaluations of hypothetical situations. Four, individuals do not appear to connect their individual experiences of inequality with structural inequities. Educational efforts to encourage critical thinking should consider both domain-based moral educational approaches as well as critical pedagogical approaches. Finally, the results suggest that previous research was misleading in the assertion that the majority of adults find their division fair. Instead, in at least 20% of the cases, adults in both countries are not evaluating their division through an assessment of fairness at all. Future research should investigate how individuals coordinate not only moral concerns of fairness and conventional norms, but also values of intimacy and affect, which may at times take precedence over moral considerations.

This study investigates how high school and college students reason about commonly accepted purposes of education. The introduction chapter presents a history of purposes of education and scholarly opinions about general purposes and concepts of education in the United States. Guided by social cognitive domain theory (SCDT; also called social domain theory), it captures how students prioritize and coordinate these competing purposes. SCDT recognizes four domains of reasoning about human experience: moral, social conventional, personal, and prudential/pragmatic. This study expands concepts of three SCDT domains to include purposes from educational models of Human Capital and Human Potential (also referred to as Human Capabilities) and extended aspects of socialization. Human capital is integrated with the pragmatic domain; human potential/capabilities is integrated with the personal domain; and socialization processes are integrated with the social-conventional domain. The resulting domains for educational purposes are labeled “HCPragmatic,” “HPPersonal,” “Moral,” and “Socialization.”

The study used mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative). The survey instrument constructed for data collection asked students for demographic information, ratings of 20 commonly recognized purposes of education, and explanations for the most and least rated purposes. This was administered to diverse samples of 451 undergraduate college students from a selective West Coast public university and to 131 high school students from public schools in the West Coast and Southeastern United States.

Both college and high school students categorized and prioritized purposes of education in terms of domains, generally in the following order: HPPersonal, Moral, Socialization, and HCPragmatic. The survey instrument also captured participant domain coordination: the capacity to employ knowledge from more than one domain to reason about and evaluate purposes of education. Students who prioritized HCPragmatic purposes over others displayed significantly less coordination among all purposes of education. Developmentally, younger high school students tended to prefer HCPragmatic purposes and to coordinate among conflicting purposes less than older students. Beginning in older adolescence, females prioritized moral educational purposes more than did males. Race and ethnicity were not significantly related to prioritization and coordination of educational purposes; however, there were significant differences by family income and parent education (two measures of socioeconomic status). College students from higher-income families showed greater preference for HPPersonal purposes, and those whose parents have higher levels of education gave less priority to HCPragmatic items. High school students whose parents have higher levels of education prioritized HPPersonal purposes more and engaged in more coordination of purposes than did students whose parents have lower levels of education.

Many students expressed beliefs that education should address multiple purposes without having them sacrifice personal growth to pursue human capital accumulation (e.g., having to choose between goals of liberal arts and STEM). The students’ preferences and justifications demonstrate a need for pursuit of education for multiple purposes despite a perceived push by educational institutions and policymakers to restrict educational purposes to social status concerns and economic competition.

This mixed methods study investigated 10th grade students' shifts in reasoning between handwritten narratives of personal conflicts and their production of digital podcast versions of the same conflicts. Specifically, shifts in perspective, resolution, domains of social reasoning, domain coordination, and storytelling elements were compared. This study was implemented as a curriculum intervention with 32 participants in a public high school in British Columbia. Analyzing multiple narrative constructions of the same personal conflict, but within different mediums, is conceptualized as a way of stimulating and bringing into view developmental transformations, including the development of critical moral reasoning and critical consciousness. Key findings include a significant decrease in victim perspectives in the podcast format, and an increase in the use of the conventional domain in students’ resolutions of their conflicts in the podcast format. The type of characters included in students' conflicts changed between narrative and podcast, and students arrived at different types of conclusions. The podcast is proposed as a storytelling format that can target specific critical moral reasoning and critical consciousness components, such as transactive reasoning, heteroglossia, and making connections between personal and societal struggles. Implications for educators include how to identify emerging critical moral reasoning and critical consciousness skills within students' podcasts, as well as barriers that students may face in the process of coming to critical conclusions.

Why do people’s moral judgments—what they decide is right or wrong—often fail to predict their actions? One prevalent example is the phenomenon of bullying: though the vast majority of young people judge bullying as wrong, a significant percentage of adolescents report having perpetrated bullying behavior, and even more have acted as bystanders, i.e., have witnessed bullying without intervening to stop it. Social domain theory (SDT) provides a framework for analyzing the reasoning behind such judgments, based on evidence that people distinguish between different domains of social knowledge—moral, conventional, personal, and prudential—when reasoning about social situations. More research is needed to investigate the relationships between domain-based socio-moral reasoning, social-emotional competencies such as perspective-taking, and intended action choices, especially among youth.

In this dissertation study, a secondary analysis using data from the larger National Professional Development and Evaluation Project, 1402 adolescent students (grades 9 and 10) drawn from 61 different high schools in 8 regions across the United States were asked to respond to a hypothetical bullying situation. In written survey-based responses, participating students rated potential reasons for a bystander to intervene in the situation and choices for how they could respond if they were to witness the situation themselves. Next, students were asked to select the single choice of action that they would be most likely to take, and then to explain in their own words why they would make that choice. The students also completed a measure of social perspective-taking competence. Using an SDT framework to examine the data, this study focused on three major research questions.

For the first research question, multilevel regression modeling, with students nested in schools, was used to relate students’ reasoning and personal/contextual factors (gender, age, and perceived bullying prevalence) to their action choice ratings, and logistic regression was used to predict their selection of a “best” action choice. Results indicated that endorsement of moral reasoning was consistently positively related to the choice to directly intervene to stop the bullying and negatively related to the choice to bystand, while endorsement of conventional reasoning was positively related to the choice to intervene indirectly (i.e., tell a teacher). Both males and students who perceived a greater prevalence of bullying at their school were significantly less likely to endorse/select either kind of intervention and significantly more likely to endorse/select bystanding and perpetration. The second research question involved coding students’ free-response explanations for SDT domains cited and relating these to their action choices. Associations between moral/conventional reasoning and action choices mirrored those found in the first research question; additionally, students who chose bystanding often cited personal and prudential considerations, and some students mentioned relational and emotional concerns as well. Finally, the third research question used mediation analyses to test for indirect effects of moral reasoning on action choices through social perspective-taking competence, which was positively associated with moral reasoning and with the positive action choices, while negatively associated with the negative action choices. Significant indirect effects were found for three of the four action choices, supporting the idea that socio-moral reasoning and social-emotional competence work together to produce moral functioning.

Findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and methodological implications for research as well as potential implications for practice, such as for anti-bullying efforts in educational settings.