Youth moral development in a Chinese context: an empirical study of Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry between self, parents, and teachers

Moral education and fostering youth character development have become the foci of Chinese moral education; yet most existing studies are confined to the Chinese education community and not shared with an international audience. This paper aims to bridge the gap between Chinese and Western explorations of moral education by engaging with the Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) framework, thereby fostering cross-cultural dialogue and advancing theoretical understanding. More specifically, the objectives of the present study were twofold: first, to use a tried-and-tested instrument based on the Chinese Code for Primary and Secondary School Students to measure the moral status of primary and secondary school students in Suzhou, China. Second, instead of administering only a student self-report survey, as used in previous studies, the present study’s design also involved the ‘significant others’ of these students, such as their teachers and parents, to observe the convergence and divergence between students’ self-evaluations and those of their significant others. The study included 1040 students, 811 parents, and 276 teachers of these students. The study used multivariate analysis of variance and individual differences, as well as multidimensional scaling, to test five hypotheses. Although the significant others were not directly paired with the individual students, but explored on a whole-cohort basis, the results offer some interesting findings for further discussion. The results indicated that this study’s hypotheses were not fully supported. However, these findings have significant implications for understanding SOKA from a collective perspective.