Urban America as a context for the development of moral identity in adolescence

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1998 by Daniel Hart, Robert Atkins, Debra Ford

Although the model for the development of moral identity in adolescents is consistent with the available research, a number of questions concerning the model cannot be answered using previously completed research. One major limitation of much of the previous research is that cross-sectional designs have been used, and consequently it is extremely difficult to identify paths of influence. For example, it is difficult to determine the extent to which personality traits influence the development of voluntary prosocial action, an element of a moral identity, when both are measured in adolescence. Second, many of the studies that have been conducted have samples that are restricted in such a way that facets of the model remain relatively untested. The relationship between social structure and the development of moral identity, for example, cannot be adequately examined in samples in which the sample of adolescents is drawn entirely from either poor or wealthy neighborhoods.

To answer some of these questions, particularly those concerning social structure and the role of opportunities, we present new analyses based on data from the NLSY. The sample of the NLSY is constituted of the more than 7,000 children born to a representative sample (with some oversampling Black and Hispanic women) of nearly 5,000 American women who were between the ages of 14 and 21 at the initiation of the study in 1979. Beginning in 1986 and every two years thereafter through 1996, the children of these women were regularly tested on measures of cognition; their mothers were interviewed about their children's personality, behavior problems, and home environment; and the older children and adolescents were asked to complete a range of self-report instruments concerning typical activities, school, drug use, self-esteem, sexual behavior, and so on. (For a description of the data set, see Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1995.) For the analyses presented below, several sets of variables relevant to the model as described above are relevant. Because some sets of variables are available only for the older children and adolescents who completed the self-report instruments, data from many of the participants in the full sample could not be included in the analyses reported below. We shall indicate in the following sections how the larger sample is winnowed to the sample used in the analyses.

To represent our criterion variable, moral identity, we used questions asked for the first time by the NLSY in 1994. These questions were posed only to participants who were 15 years old or olden One of these questions asked whether participants had "performed any volunteer or community work through such organizations as Little League, scouts, service clubs, church groups, or social action groups." Participants who answered positively then were asked to answer "yes" or "no" to questions about whether this community service was (a) strictly voluntary, (b) court ordered, (c) required or sponsored by school, (d) required or sponsored by the church, or (e) required for other reasons. We judged that those participants who (1) had done community service, (2) claimed that the community service was voluntary, and (3) reported that the community service was neither court-ordered nor required for other reasons were involved in prosocial activity of the kind consistent with a moral identity. We recognize that this pattern of judgments, hereafter called voluntary service, does not capture all that the concept of moral identity as described earlier connotes. In particular, this pattern of judgments does not reveal the extent to which the commitment to help others is connected to the sense of self and identity. Nonetheless, we shall assume that many adolescents who are involved in strictly voluntary community service perceive a connection between their actions and their views of themselves, and consequently we will use the pattern of judgments described above as a probabilistic indicator of the initial stages of the formation of a moral identity. Below, we provide descriptive information about voluntary service and its relation to family income, gender, and race/ethnic status. Next, we use voluntary service both to predict concurrently measured problem behaviors, assessing the individual outcome of moral identity as depicted in Figure 1, and as the dependent variable in logistic regression analyses, using markers of social structure, personality, and opportunities measured at earlier testing periods as predictors.