The purpose of this study was to investiga-to moral reasoning among 77 senior medical students. Data were collected through selfreport~~d questionnaires in June, 1995.
The short form of the DIT (Rest"s Defining Issues Test) was adopted to measure the stage of moral development. which was classified with the stage 2(instrumental relativist orientation), the stage 3(interpersonal concordance), the stage 4(law and order). the stage 5A(societal consensus), and the stage 5B (intuitional humanism), stage 6(universal ethical practice). In particular, the level of principled thinking(P) was measured by summing those scores of the stages 5A, 5B. and 6. The possible range of P is 0 to 95.
The data were analyzed by t-test. ANOVA. The results were as follows.
1. The mean score of P(%) was 44.07 (SD=12.8 2) . A.nd the mean score of the stage 5A was higher than the scores of other stages. The mean score of P was not significantly different by general characteristics of the students.
2. The mean score of the stage 5B revealed significant, difference by religion (3.17, P=.019) : The score was highest in Buddhist (8.0), which was followed by protestant (6.1). catholic (5.61 and no religion (4.7).
3. The mean score of the stage 4 revealed significant difference by educational background of mother (3.24. P=.017) :the Score was highest in graduate school (25.0), which was followed by high school (14.1). under-graduate school (13.9), elementary school (12.4). middle school (8.3).
|