Patterns of Change in Children's Social Reasoning: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study

DAMON, WILLIAM. Patterns of Change in Children's Social Reasoning: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 1010-1017. 34 boys and girls between the ages of 4 and 9 were interviewed on their conceptions of positive justice and parental authority and then reinterviewed 1 and 2 years later. Despite a number of no-changes and reversals from year to year on each interview, by the end of 2 years the clear tendency was toward progressive, stepwise movement along an ordered sequence of reasoning levels. Children who were initially scored at lower reasoning levels than others the same age tended to catch up to their peers in subsequent years; and movements of great magnitude in 1 year tended to be compensated by lateral or downward movement in the next. In any year, scattered reasoning at levels above a subject's modal reasoning level was positively related to progressive change in the subject's modal score in the following year. This finding, upheld for both positive justice and authority, suggests that reasoning spread in an upward direction is a good predictor of a subsequent developmental transition, at least as regards concept acquisition within the social domain. It was concluded that even stagelike development in children's social reasoning proceeds gradually, with important continuities in children's social-cognitive performances from 1 year to the next.