Effect of Culture on Women's Interpretations of Moral and Conventional Dilemmas.

The article investigates the effect of culture on women's appraisals of moral and conventional dilemmas. Recent research on sex differences has focused on American subjects. The term American in these studies has meant that the subjects were not recent arrivals to this country, but rather that they and their families had been here for many years, even generations. Little research has been carried out on the relationship between age, gender, and culture and the ability to resolve social conflicts for subjects who have emigrated from another country to the United States, an experience common to many Americans. These episodes depicted social transgression, representative of either the moral or conventional domain. The moral domain included social breaches involving psychological or physical harm to another person, as well as issues of fairness or justice. The results for the children did not reflect any statistically significant differences. All the children in the study responded similarly. Moving between two cultures did not appear to alter the responses of the bicultural children. The results for the adults did indicate differences in the interpretation of the social breach episodes. Rank-order coefficients of correlation were calculated between all possible groups of adult rankers; men, women, Sicilians, Americans, and Sicilian-Americans.