| The current research sought to assess children's (10-11 years), adolescents' (13-14 years), and adult's (Psy100 students) perceptions regarding the importance and obligation to engage in various civic activities. Drawing from previous research on the topic of civic obligation, participants were presented with five different types of civic acts (voting, volunteering, charity work, clubs & sports, and petitions/protests) and were asked to assess the extent to which these acts were important, obligatory, and legally mandatory. Of interest was also participants' justifications for their responses, which were coded according to moral reasoning, personal choice, or practical factors which mitigated responses. Finally, measures of moral identity were administered to explore the extent to which individual differences in the personal importance of moral qualities influenced responses. Results suggested that younger participants rated charitable endeavors as more obligatory and legally mandatory than did the young adults. Conversely, the young adults tended to prioritize voting more highly relative to the younger participants. Supplementing these findings were the justification analyses, which suggested that younger participants used more moral reasoning in their responses to questions about charitable organizations compared to the young adults. Results also suggested that moral identity was related to the quantitative evaluations of the different civic activities. Moral identity was also positively associated with the use of moral reasoning within morally salient activities across all situations. Regression models indicated that this link between moral identity and moral cognition persisted when age effects were controlled. |
