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

The effect of culture on women's appraisals of moral and conventional dilemmas was investigated. American, Sicilian, and Sicilian-American adult subjects evaluated four social breach episodes by using Q methodology (Kerlinger, 1973; Stephenson, 1953). For each story, rank-order coefficients of correlation were calculated. An extremity-of-rating mixed-model analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied to the mean scores of the Q-sort episodes. The results indicated that Sicilian-American women interpreted the moral and conventional dilemmas differently from all other groups: They favored moral reasoning, whereas Sicilians, Americans, and Sicilian-American men relied strongly on socio-conventional thinking when evaluating the social conflicts.