| Responding to calls from child development experts for research methodologies that integrate developmental and cultural understandings of cognitive development, this investigation explored and described the types of reasoning evident in children's understanding of how courtroom verdicts are determined. Drawing upon research in the field of child development as well as upon research conducted on children's reasoning in legal contexts, children's understanding of how courtroom verdicts are determined was examined from two theoretical perspectives: cognitive-developmental and sociocultural.;Participants were 72 urban, public school children in the (24 in the 1st grade, 24 in the 5th grade, and 24 in the 8th grade). They were interviewed individually about their understanding of how courtroom verdicts are determined and asked to respond to four hypothetical legal situations. Participants also completed a perspective-taking task.;Results of this investigation indicate that children and adolescent's reasoning about how verdicts are determined varies with advancing cognitive development and age. Perspective taking ability was significantly correlated with children's causal reasoning about how courtroom verdicts are determined. In addition, support was found for the hypothesis that children's perceptions of the influences on verdicts follow a developmental sequence.;Results also demonstrated that children and adolescent's justifications for the cause of particular verdicts varied with regard to certain contextual and situational variables. Participants' tendency to employ collectivistic versus individualistic justifications for particular verdicts varied as a function of their strength of identification with an ethnic group. In addition, situational variables (e.g., severity of the crime and motivation for the crime) impacted participants' responses to the legal dilemmas. |
