Quantifying the Moral Dimension. New steps in the implementation of Kohlberg’s method and theory. Fedor Kozyrev

the awareness of the respondent about social demands but on the ability to understand moral situations. The idea was to reveal the motivation standing behind the moral decision of a respondent in a certain situation. It was expected to reflect the development of moral consciousness not at the level of theoretical knowledge about ethical norms and rules but at the level of their implementation. Moreover, the identification of higher stages of moral development with the ability for «post-conventional’ moral judgment meant the demand for the respondent to exhibit some signs of autonomy in order to show good results in the test.

      Kohlberg’s methodological approach met extensive criticism. Besides the axiomatic objection against the reduction of morality to cognitive aspects, the main points of his critics may be presented as follows:

      – The scheme of successive moral development embedded into the method groundlessly claims to be universal. It does not take into account the socio-cultural determinacy of morality.

      – The method is time consuming and non-effective. As interpretation of interviews is a complicated procedure not apt for unification, the risk of impartiality and subjectivism of diagnoses is too high.

      – Successful execution of the test depends a great deal on the linguistic and communicative abilities of a child. In fact, the method misses its target.

      Despite its reasonableness the criticism did not discredit the dilemma method, but on the contrary stimulated attempts at its improvement and became a powerful factor that helped to spread quantitative approaches in the field of personal moral development studies. The conversion of the interview into the form of a written standardised test may be regarded as the most important result of the international movement for the rehabilitation of Kohlberg that started already in his lifetime. Among the most successful implementations of his idea one should point out the Moral Judgment Test (MJT), designed in 1975 by Georg Lind, a German researcher from the University of Constance, and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) designed in 1974 by a group of scholars from Minnesota University (USA) under the leadership of a Kohlberg’s disciple James Rest. Both tests are recommended by their authors as instruments for measuring the level of development of moral consciousness and for assessment of efficiency of educational institutions and programmes in moral education. Tests proved their validity on samples that included in total more than 800 000 respondents all over the world. Their results are published in dozens of papers. ONYX is a product of a deep modification of these two foreign analogues.