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

Personality. Unfortunately, the NLSY collects relatively little data on personality. However, several measures of personality can be derived from the maternal reports of temperament, which were obtained for children six years old and younger. Baydar (1995) examined the temperament ratings, and concluded that two dimensions can be abstracted: attachment and compliance. The attachment variable is formed from questionnaire items that ask mothers to rate their children's ability to regulate their emotions and to maintain healthy social relationships, and consequently bears marked similarity to many other broad personality traits such as ego resilience (see, for example, Block & Kremen, 1996). We estimated the attachment variable using the item weights for children ages three to six reported by Baydar (1995).

Because the necessary items for estimating attachment were asked only for children ages six and under, only those adolescents who were six years old in 1986 were old enough by 1994 to respond to the volunteering questions. Moreover, because the collection of data on children did not begin until 1986, children who were seven years old or older in 1986 have no data relevant for the attachment variable either. The consequence is that there are only 180 participants available for the analysis of personality and voluntary service. However, attachment scores in 1986 do predict which adolescents reported involvement in voluntary service in 1994: The correlation is r = 17, p [less than] .05.

Opportunities: Institutions and relationships. Although the NLSY has no data that pertain to moral judgment or the sense of self, it does offer data that permit an assessment of the contribution of opportunities to the formation of a moral identity. As we noted earlier, we believe that a moral identity is more likely to form if the adolescent has sustained involvement with community institutions and responsible adults. Involvement with institutions is indexed in our analyses by an item in the 1992 survey that asked adolescents to report whether they belonged to a club or a team. Eighty-two percent of the adolescents who reported voluntary service in 1994 were connected to a team or a club in 1992; only 8% of those not involved with a club or team in 1992 went on to participate in voluntary community service by 1994. We assessed the effects of connections to responsible adults by correlating adolescents' judgments on a four-point scale of the extent to which their teachers were "willing to help with personal problems" in 1992 with voluntary service in 1994; the correlation was not significant.

Paths of influence. The model depicted in Figure 1 suggests that personality, social structure, and opportunities all make partially independent contributions to the development of a moral identity. We tested this assumption by using logistic regression, using as the dependent measure voluntary service and entering as predictors average income, Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scores, race/ethnicity, and team/club membership (the attachment measure was not included because it is available only for a fraction of the participants). Also, we included in the equation gender and a measure of academic ability (the Reading Comprehension subtest of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test) in order to control for these factors. The results of the analysis are presented in Table 1.