Relationship among measures within the social and moral development domain

This paper investigates using the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) as a framework to study individual’s stages of moral understanding. As an improvement from traditional stages of moral development, 15 stages of moral understanding were generated using the Model of Hierarchical Complexity. Data were collected in four separate studies on how participants make choices in specific moral dilemmas. Each study presented five or six vignettes of arguments, each constructed to have different Orders of Hierarchical Complexity. Participants rated the quality of arguments on a 1 to 6 scale. A Rasch analysis produced stage scores for each of the stories. The Rasch scores were regressed against the Order of Hierarchical Complexity of each vignette. These were Counselor-Patient: r (3) = .992; Anti-Death-Penalty: r(3) = .919; Incest –No Report: r(3) = .916; Incest – Report: r(3) = .624. The result showed that Rasch scores of vignettes were predicted by their Orders of Hierarchical Complexity, suggesting that the Model of Hierarchical Complexity was a good framework to study stage of moral understanding.