Urban America as a Context for the Development of Moral Identity in Adolescence

Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 54, No. 3. 1998, pp . 513-530

Urban America as a Context for the Development of Moral Identity in Adolescence

Daniel Hart* and Robert Atkins Rutgers University

Debra Ford Northeastern Universitv

Moral identity, defined as a self-consistent commitment to lines of action benefiting others, is described in the contexts of adolescence and poor; urban neighborhoods. A model of moral identity development is proposed. According to the model, stable characteristics of the individual and the individual s family, in conjunction with social attitudes, self-conceptions, and opportunities for the exploration of proso- cia1 action, influence the development of moral identity. Analyses from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth provide support for the model, and demonstrate that urban poverty is associated with few opportunities for development of moral identity. We argue that the provision of these opportunities should be given a highprior- ity both to foster good individual development and as a means for increasing social capital in neighborhoods.

Adolescent morality is a topic that has long been at the forefront of social policy debate in the United States. In recent years, the perceived lack of morality in the teen years has resulted in a groundswell of support for harsh sanctions against adolescents judged deficient in moral character. To give only two examples of this trend, expenditures have increased dramatically for the incarceration of adolescents and young adults convicted of crimes (Skolnick, 1994) and financial support for teenaged mothers has been restricted (Jencks & Edin, 1995), with both trends reflecting societal judgments that crime and pregnancy among teenagers reflect deep ethical flaws. Because teenage fertility and crime rates are higher among

*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Daniel Hart, Department of Psy- chology, Armitage Hall, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 3 11 N. Fifth Street, Camden, NJ 08 102- 1405; e-mail: [email protected]

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0 1998 The Society for the Psychological Sludy of Social Issue?

514 Hart, Atkins, and Ford

urban, minority populations than among suburban populations, these sanctions affect urban minority adolescents to a much greater degree than those living in majority, middle-class homes.

The urge to punish harshly adolescents who exhibit these types of supposed character flaws has many sources. One of these is a growing tendency in the general public to believe that socially important patterns of behavior are resistant to change because they are determined either by early parental influence or biology. For example, in a recent Newsweek article, Samuelson (1998) suggested that the failure of a government intervention program to enhance the development of low-income children reflected the domination of poor parenting over all other sources of influence on development. Biological explanations for human behavior are increasingly popular as well. Recent books highlighting the genetic underpinnings of individual differences in personality (e.g., Harris, 1998; Wright, 1998) reflect what has been called “perhaps this century’s most profound shift in thought. . . [that]-the genetic heritage of both species and individuals-began to be perceived as a guiding if not controlling force, first in animal behavior and then increasingly in different kinds of human conduct” (Bickerton, 1998). The popularity among many in the United States of the argument for the heritability and immutability of IQ presented in The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is another of the more public indicators of the ascendance of biological determinism as a worldview on social behavior. Although scientists know that findings from behavioral genetic research have few implications for social policy, the general public and government officials do not always understand this fact (for a review, see Tucker, 1994). Together these two trends-the responsibility of parents and biological determinism-encourage the public to withdraw from troubled adolescents.

In our view, the emphasis of current social policy on isolating, segregating, and punishing adolescent transgressors obscures from the public view both the genuine moral strengths of adolescents and the opportunities that the developmental process offers for fruitful intervention with youth. To provide for the political and civic development of youth, social policy must be formulated on the basis of knowledge of the strengths and opportunities of adolescents rather than upon the graphic por- trayals of antisocial teenagers that gain media coverage. Our goal in this article is to describe the nature of moral identity, a particular type of moral strength that often binds the adolescent to facets of the public community. We shall suggest that moral identity in this sense is of fundamental importance for political socialization in the United States. We shall also describe the factors that influence the development of moral identity in urban adolescents. We shall suggest that (1) moral identities are commonly found among urban adolescents, (2) urban adolescents have an interest in constructing and enacting moral identities, (3) environmental support for the development of moral identities is lacking for urban adolescents, and (4) it is imperative that more be done to foster the development of moral identities among America’s urban youth. In marshaling support for our model of moral identity and

Moral Identity Development 515

its development, we shall draw upon our own work in Camden, New Jersey, the work of others, and new analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY).

Moral Identity

Moral identity can be described as a commitment consistent with one’s sense of self to lines of action that promote or protect the welfare of others.’ Moral identity is related to, but distinct from, domains of psychological functioning that are impli- cated in moral life. For example, moral identity cannot be reduced to sophisticated moral reasoning, because there are many people capable of the latter whose lives show little evidence of commitment to, or action toward, moral goals. Nor can moral identity be reduced to personality traits linked to prosocial behavior such as resilience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or generativity. This is because the relations of these traits to specific lines of action and to the sense of self are indirect and weak. We believe that the emphasis on the binding of self to specific moral pursuits characteristic of our notion of moral identity-and absent in notions like moral judgment and personality traits-is necessary for a full accounting of moral life.

One facet of moral life where the concept of moral identity is particularly relevant concerns exemplary moral behavior. Colby and Damon (1995) interviewed adult moral exemplars who had devoted much of their lives to advance moral goals. Colby and Damon found that the moral exemplars reported that their efforts flowed naturally from their ideals. There are few adolescents who show this level of integration of self and morality-there are few adults as well-but there are many adolescents who have the potential to move toward this integration. Strikingly, many of the adolescents who develop rudimentary moral identities do so in the face of considerable adversity. It is useful in this context to describe briefly our previous research on adolescents’ moral identities conducted in Camden, New Jersey. According to a recent national survey sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust, Cam- den has the second highest rate of childhood poverty in the United States, at slightly more than 50% (Lindsay, 1998). It is much more difficult to develop successfully into adulthood in Camden than it is in most other cities and towns in America. Despite the obstacles to healthy development found in Camden, many adolescents there are astoundingly successful in constructing lives characterized by purpose and resilience. Our focus has been on adolescents in Camden in whom purpose and resilience has resulted in moral identities. By soliciting community nominations,

‘The notion of moral identity might be extended in many reasonable directions. One could broaden the definition to include responsibilities to oneself, for example, to incorporate Kant’s notion of virtue. Consequently, we are not defining the concept of moral identity, simply operationalizing one reasonable meaning of it.


we identified a group of adolescents whose efforts to promote the welfare of others were quite profound. These adolescents worked in soup kitchens, helped the el- derly, worked with children in their neighborhoods, and so on (for details, see Hart & Fegley, 1995).

People in the community benefit from these actions-hungry people are fed, for example-but equally important is that the adolescents who work to help others are joining and renewing the foundation of the American political and social system. More than 150 years ago, Tocqueville (1966) reported that voluntary associations of Americans drawn together to pursue moral, social, and economic goals were necessary for the American political system to thrive. More recently, Putnam (1996) and Fukuyama (1995), drawing upon survey data, cross-cultural compari- sons, and economic analyses, have argued convincingly that social functioning and economic success are dependent upon the widespread participation of Americans in voluntary social organizations. If Tocqueville, Putnam, and Fukuyama are right in their analyses of American culture and its political system, then the adolescents we studied made genuine contributions to the fabric of their communities and were at the same time contributing to the success of the democratic system.

The adolescents included in this study had the qualities that define moral identity: commitments to lines of action advancing the welfare of others that are consistent with their views of themselves (fordetails, see Hart & Fegley, 1995; Hart, Yates, Fegley, & Wilson, 1995). That these adolescents-or adolescents anywhere-construct moral identities is not surprising. As Davidson and Youniss (1991) have argued, the developmental and social transformations occurring across the threshold into adolescence allow for the first time the development of a moral identity. These transformations focus adolescents on resolving questions of the relation of self to moral regulations, and answers to these questions form one base for the formation of a moral identity. Not only are adolescents thinking about what is the right thing to do; many are acting. Sustained, reasoned commitment to lines of prosocial action are absent in childhood but can be found among adolescents (Hart, Yates, Fegley, & Wilson).

Nor should it be surprising that adolescents with moral identities are found in impoverished, urban communities as well as in majority, affluent, suburban neighborhoods. Contrary to stereotypes suggesting that minority youth are lacking in moral character, national surveys suggest that a higher percentage of Black adolescents than White adolescents judge as extremely important goals such as correcting social and economic inequalities, being a leader in one’s community, and making a contribution to society (US. Department of Health and Human Services, 1996). The heightened interest of minority adolescents in constructing identities in which concern for others is salient may derive from their perceptions of the need of their communities for their help.

Not only are the activities of adolescents pursuing moral goals beneficial to the direct recipients and to the communities in which these activities occur, but to the


adolescents themselves. There is considerable evidence that involvement in proso- cia1 activities (which can be interpreted as aprobabilistic sign that a moral identity is present) has a protective effect on individual development. For example, adolescents involved in service clubs do better academically and are involved in fewer risky behaviors than adolescents of the same academic ability who are not (Barber & Eccles, 1997), and community service is associated with lower rates of illicit drug use (Youniss, Yates, & Su, 1997). To the extent that moral identity helps support such actions, then it behooves society to attend to moral identity as one facet of personal resilience.

To summarize, adolescents exhibit the capacity to form moral identities, and this capacity may be absent in children. Urban, minority adolescents value moral goals and frequently develop commitments to lines of action that reflect these goals. In cities like Camden, the contributions of adolescents with moral identities to the social capital of the community are substantial. The construction of moral identities may confer protective benefits upon the adolescents who construct them.

A Model of Moral Identity Formation

How do moral identities form? This question is extremely important from a social policy perspective, and the research in Camden contributes to an answer, though it does not answer it completely. Figure 1 depicts our current model of the key components in the process of constructing a moral identity. At the right edge of the figure are the hypothesized outcomes of the formation of a moral identity that we discussed above: good outcomes for the individual and increased social capital for the community.

At the left edge of the figure are enduring qualities of individuals and their contexts that are hypothesized to influence the formation of moral identity. For example, there are relatively stable personality characteristics-sympathy, responsibility, and the ability to form social relationships-that should make it easier for individuals to adopt moral goals (see Eisenberg, Fabes, Karbon, & Murphy, 1996, for an example). Similarly, adolescents who have families that are supportive and helpful are more likely to develop moral aspirations that promote the welfare of others (Rosenhan, 1970). Conversely, disorganized families, poverty, an inability to sympathize with others, a lack of personal resiliency, and so on are likely to interfere with the acquisition of a moral identity. These enduring qualities are predicted to have direct and indirect effects on the formation of identity, and we review research supportive of this idea below.

According to the model, there are other sources of influence on moral identity besides those that form the backdrop to development. These include moral judgments and social attitudes, self-conceptions, and opportunities. These qualities show considerable development and change over the course of childhood and


Fig. 1. Model of moral identity formation.

adolescence and may be more sensitive to social context and intervention than the enduring features of individuals.

The relations of moral judgment and social attitudes to the elements of moral identity have been frequently studied. If moral judgments and social attitudes are narrowly construed as scores on developmental scales (e.g., measures of moral judgment sophistication such as Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieberman, 1983), then the relation to moral behavior, moral commitment, and conceptions of the self as a moral actor are weak but fairly consistently positive (for a review, see Rest, 1983; for an exception to this generalization, see the findings to the study of Cam- den youth described above in Hart & Fegley, 1995). However, if moral judgment and social attitudes are studied as part of the narratives that persons involved in moral lines of action tell, then the importance of moral judgments and social attitudes are manifest (e.g., Youniss & Yates, 1997). As suggested by the paths of influence outlined in Figure 1, moral judgment is influenced by personality (e.g., Hart, Edelstein, Keller, & Hofmann, in press), family relationships (Hart, 1988), and social class (Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieberman, 1983), and is related to self-conceptions (Hart, 1992).


Self-conceptions play an important role in the formation of a moral identity. The commitment to a specific type of prosocial activity is in part a consequence of, and partly the source for, an idealized image of oneself (Hart, Yates, Fegley, & Wil- son, 1995). An idealized self-image motivates and supports commitment when the commitment demands more than can be considered typical. One might understand those who volunteer numerous hours as having ideal selves that pull them toward their actions even though the depth of their commitments may not result in the grati- fication and sense of respect that those who lack moral goals have. At the same time, the commitment to the activity-despite the hardships it produces in one’s life structure-results in new attributions to the ideal self that are consistent with the activity. Moral action at high levels demands justifications to self and to others that heighten the salience of moral perspectives in evaluation of self and other.

Finally, the model posits that the formation of a moral identity is made easier if adolescents can explore lines of moral action, if they are supported in these explorations by relationships with persons they respect, and if they feel as if their actions genuinely contribute to the welfare of others. Adolescents in the United States are provided many opportunities to try out academic identities, athletic identities, artistic identities, peer identities, and so on, and we believe that the acquisition of moral identities may be fostered by providing the same kind of support. In our experience, these opportunities are most likely to occur in the context of local social institutions that connect the adolescent to the community, such as church groups, service clubs, school activities, and so on. Whereas some identity-forming opportunties like sports activities may be explored without institutional affilia- tions, we suspect that moral identities-like academic identities and artistic identities-may require the adult and community support that is commonly found in organized social institutions.

Although the model for the development of moral identity in adolescents is consistent with the available research, a number of questions concerning the model cannot be answered using previously completed research. One major limitation of much of the previous research is that cross-sectional designs have been used, and consequently it is extremely difficult to identify paths of influence. For example, it is difficult to determine the extent to which personality traits influence the development of voluntary prosocial action, an element of a moral identity, when both are measured in adolescence. Second, many of the studies that have been conducted have samples that are restricted in such a way that facets of the model remain relatively untested. The relationship between social structure and the development of moral identity, for example, cannot be adequately examined in samples in which the sample of adolescents is drawn entirely from either poor or wealthy neighborhoods.

To answer some of these questions, particularly those concerning social structure and the role of opportunities, we present new analyses based on data from the NLSY. The sample of the NLSY is constituted of the more than 7,000 children born to a representative sample (with some oversampling Black and Hispanic women) of


nearly 5,000 American women who were between the ages of 14 and 2 1 at the initia- tion of the study in 1979. Beginning in 1986 and every two years thereafter through 1996, the children of these women were regularly tested on measures of cognition; their mothers were interviewed about their children’s personality, behavior problems, and home environment; and the older children and adolescents were asked to complete a range of self-report instruments concerning typical activities, school, drug use, self-esteem, sexual behavior, and so on. (For a description of the data set, see Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1995.) For the analyses presented below, several sets of variables relevant to the model as described above are relevant. Because some sets of variables are available only for the older children and adolescents who completed the self-report instruments, data from many of the participants in the full sample could not be included in the analyses reported below. We shall indicate in the following sections how the larger sample is winnowed to the sample used in the analyses.

To represent our criterion variable, moral identity, we used questions asked for the first time by the NLSY in 1994. These questions were posed only to participants who were 15 years old or older. One of these questions asked whether participants had “performed any volunteer or community work through such organizations as Little League, scouts, service clubs, church groups, or social action groups.” Participants who answered positively then were asked to answer “yes” or “no” to questions about whether this community service was (a) strictly voluntary, (b) court ordered, (c) required or sponsored by school, (d) required or sponsored by the church, or (e) required for other reasons. We judged that those participants who (1) had done community service, ( 2 ) claimed that the community service was voluntary, and (3) reported that the community service was neither court-ordered nor required for other reasons were involved in prosocial activity of the kind consistent with a moral identity. We recognize that this pattern of judgments, hereafter called Voluntary service, does not capture all that the concept of moral identity as described earlier connotes. In particular, this pattern of judgments does not reveal the extent to which the commitment to help others is connected to the sense of self and identity. Nonetheless, we shall assume that many adolescents who are involved in strictly voluntary community service perceive a connection between their actions and their views of themselves, and consequently we will use the pattern of judgments described above as a probabilistic indicator of the initial stages of the formation of a moral identity. Below, we provide descrip- tive information about voluntary service and its relation to family income, gender, and race/ethnic status. Next, we use voluntary service both to predict concurrently measured problem behaviors, assessing the individual outcome of moral identity as depicted in Figure 1, and as the dependent variable in logistic regression analyses, using markers of social structure, personality, and opportunities measured at earlier testing periods as predictors.


Voluntary Service in American Adolescents

Eight hundred and twenty-eight adolescents and young adults answered the questions relevant for the determination of voluntary service. Only those responding to these questions were eligible to be included in the analyses reported below. Of those responding to the questions about community service, 19.2% (159) reported that they had participated in voluntary service in the previous 2 years. This reflects substantial involvement in the community and belies global characterizations of adolescents as uninvolved and self-centered.

Predicted Outcomes: Rates of Problem Behaviors

In 1994, participants were asked to report for the previous year whether or not they had been involved in one of 17 problem behaviors (e.g., “gotten into a fight”) or situations that resulted from problem behavior (e.g., “had to bring your parents to school because of something you did wrong”). Adolescents involved in voluntary service were less likely than other adolescents to be involved in five of these (steal- ing something worth more than $50, using force to get something, attacking some- one to inflict serious injury, breaking into a building, and having had to bring one’s parents into school, allps < .lo). The magnitude of all the associations between voluntary service and problem behaviors is quite small, which is consonant with the multidetermined nature of deviant behavior.’ As suggested by the model, then, moral identity appears to be associated with, though not strongly predictive of, good individual outcomes.

Longitudinal Predictors of Voluntary Service

Social structure. Voluntary service, as predicted by the model, is clearly related to income: Those who volunteered came from households with an average total net family income3 between 1986 and 1994 of $34,800, whereas those who were not involved in voluntary service were from less affluent homes (with a mean income of $24,000). Given that poverty tends to be concentrated in minority neighborhoods, it is not surprising that involvement in voluntary service was less frequent among minority adolescents: 40.2% of White adolescents (76 of 189) participated

Surprisingly, those involved in community service were slightly more likely to report lying about something important to their parents than those who were not. We speculate that this trend reflects different ways of defining “important,” with those involved in voluntary activity having a lower threshold than those who were not involved, but cannot offer compelling evidence for this suggestion.

‘We used net family income averaged over a period of years, because research has shown that yearly fluctuations in income may obscure the influence of income on development (for a review, see Mayer, 1997).


in voluntary community service, while only 15% of Hispanic adolescents (27 of 176) and 16.9% (56 of 33 1) of Black adolescents were involved in community service (x2 = 22.6, p < .Ol).

Family support. Family support is measured in the NLSY by the Home Obser- vation for the Measurement of the Environment-Short Form (HOME-SF). The HOME-SF consists of a series of items intended to assess the cognitive, social, and emotional resources available to the child in the home. In the analyses here, the stan- dard score for 1992 is used as a global index of family upp port.^ The correlation of family support in 1992 with voluntary service in 1994 was r = .20,p < .01, suggesting that adolescents whose parents could furnish them with cognitive, social, and emotional resources were more likely to become involved in voluntary service.

Personality. Unfortunately, the NLSY collects relatively little data on personality. However, several measures of personality can be derived from the maternal reports of temperament, which were obtained for children six years old and younger. Baydar ( 1995) examined the temperament ratings, and concluded that two dimensions can be abstracted: attachment and compliance. The attachment variable is formed from questionnaire items that ask mothers to rate their children’s ability to regulate their emotions and to maintain healthy social relationships, and consequently bears marked similarity to many other broad personality traits such as ego resilience (see, for example, Block & Kremen, 1996). We estimated the attachment variable using the item weights for children ages three to six reported by Baydar (1995).

Because the necessary items for estimating attachment were asked only for children ages six and under, only those adolescents who were six years old in 1986 were old enough by 1994 to respond to the volunteering questions. Moreover, because the collection of data on children did not begin until 1986, children who were seven years old or older in 1986 have no data relevant for the attachment variable either. The consequence is that there are only 180 participants available for the analysis of personality and voluntary service. However, attachment scores in 1986 do predict which adolescents reported involvement in voluntary service in 1994: The correlation is r = 17, p < .05.

Opportunities: Institutions and relationships. Although the NLSY has no data that pertain to moral judgment or the sense of self, it does offer data that permit an assessment of the contribution of opportunities to the formation of a moral identity.

4Confirmatory factor analyses by Ferron, Ng’Andu, and Garrett (1994) indicate that the factor structure of the HOME-SF suggests that more than one domain is tapped by the measure. However, these researchers failed to find a set of factor scores statistically superior to the global index used here.


As we noted earlier, we believe that a moral identity is more likely to form if the adolescent has sustained involvement with community institutions and responsible adults. Involvement with institutions is indexed in our analyses by an item in the 1992 survey that asked adolescents to report whether they belonged to a club or a team. Eighty-two percent of the adolescents who reported voluntary service in 1994 were connected to a team or aclub in 1992; only 8% of those not involved with aclub or team in 1992 went on to participate in voluntary community service by 1994. We assessed the effects of connections to responsible adults by correlating adolescents’ judgments on afour-point scale of the extent to which their teachers were “willing to help with personal problems” in 1992 with voluntary service in 1994; the correlation was not significant.

Paths of influence. The model depicted in Figure 1 suggests that personality, social structure, and opportunities all make partially independent contributions to the development of a moral identity. We tested this assumption by using logistic regression, using as the dependent measure voluntary service and entering as predictors average income, Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment (HOME) scores, race/ethnicity, and teadclub membership (the attachment measure was not included because it is available only for a fraction of the participants). Also, we included in the equation gender and a measure of academic ability (the Reading Comprehension subtest of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test) in order to control for these factors. The results of the analysis are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Results of Logistic Regression Analysis Predicting Voluntary Service

Variable B SE Wald df P R Exp(B)

Average income

HOME score, 1992 Membership in a club/team, 1992

Age, 1994

Majority (-I)/Hispanic ( 3 1 Black (3 Hispanic (-I)/ Black (1) Gender (males= l/females=2)

Peabody Reading Comprehension percentile, 1992

7.73E-06 3.797E-06

,0019 ,0009

1.3199 ,2881

4.1445

4.6165

20.9891

,0418 ,0317

.oooo

.0609

,0672 .I81 1

1 .moo 1.0019

3.7429

-.0117 ,0074

-.5394 ,2431

2.4959

4.9245 ,1141 ,0265

-.0293 -.07 1 1

,9884

,5831

,0312 .3435 ,0082 1 ,9277 .oooo 1.0317

,7026 ,2358 8.8798 1 ,0029 ,1090 2.0190

,0105 ,0045 5.5306 1 .O 187 ,0781 1.0106

Note: n = 586


In general, the results of the analysis are consistent with the model in Figure 1. Average family income and HOME scores, representing enduring influences on moral identity formation, had direct influences on voluntary service. Similarly, opportunities for exploration of moral identity afforded by attachment to voluntary social organizations (clubs, teams) influenced the likelihood that adolescents would be involved in voluntary service. Finally, the results indicate that females were more likely than males to become involved in community service. The finding of a significant difference related to gender is quite interesting and suggests that gender-typed patterns of moral and political socialization deserve further attention in future re~earch.~

The values of R in Table 1 provide one way of assessing the relative contributions of each variable to the prediction of voluntary service. By this index, membership on a team or in a club in 1992 was a better predictor of voluntary service in 1994 than was income, home environment, or academic ability.6

Because membership on a team or in a club was the best predictor of voluntary service, we ran a second logistic regression analysis with the participants used in the analyses above to identity the factors associated with membership. The results of this analysis are reported in Table 2.

Many of the factors that predicted voluntary service also predicted membership on teams and in clubs. It appears from this analysis that entry into teams and clubs was associated with income, ethnicity, perceptions that teachers were caring, HOME scores, and gender.

Summary. The analyses of data from the NLSY support the model proposed in Figure 1. Voluntary service was associated with lower levels of some forms of deviant behavior. More importantly, the developmental antecedents proposed by the model received support from the analyses. Personality, social class, gender, and family environment were all shown to predict involvement in community service years later. Moreover, opportunities offered by attachment to institutional groups- teams and clubs-seem to have been powerful facilitators of involvement in community service.

5We tested for interactions between gender and each of the other variables used in the prediction of voluntary service, and none was found to be statistically significant.

hWe ran the same analysis including the attachment variable, which reduces the sample size to 143. Attachment in 1986, membership in a club in 1992, and gender were the only significant predictors in this equation. Although the significance of personality in the prediction of voluntary service is confirm- ing of the model, the small number of participants reduces power, and it is therefore likely that the same pattern of significant and nonsignificant predictors would not be replicated in another sample.


Table 2. Results of Loeistic Reeression Analvsis Predictine Membershio on a Team or in a Club

Variable B SE Wald df Sig R Exp(B)

Average income 6.09E-06 2.573E-06 5.6078 1 .O 179 HOME score, 1992 ,0030

Age, 1992 ,0064

Hispanic (l/3)/ Black (1/3) White (O)/ ,5380 Hispanic (-1/2)/ Black( 1 /2)

(males= l/females=2)

teachers as caring, 1992 Peabody Reading -.0002 Comprehension percentile, 1992

White (-2/3)/ -.3285

Gender -.3410

Perceptions of -. 1755

,0004 46.9062 1 .oooo ,0026 6.1519 1 ,0131 ,1304 6.3472 1 ,0118

,1542 12.1651 1 ,0005

,1178 8.3732 I ,0038

,0670 6.8619 1 ,0088

.0002 .5221 1 ,4699

,0449 1.0000 ,1584 1.0030 ,0482 1.0064 -.0493 ,7200

,0754 1.7125

-.0597 ,7111

-.0521 .8391

.OOOO ,9998

Note: n =1,563.

Social Policy and the Development of Moral Identity

The Problem

At the outset of the presentation of our analyses, we reported that despite the professed interest of minority adolescents in pursuing moral goals, the percentage of minority adolescents involved in voluntary service was lower than that of majority adolescents. The analyses that followed after that shed some light on the sources of that apparent contradiction. In particular, we wish to suggest that poverty, and the concentration of poverty in minority neighborhoods, reduces the opportunities that seem to be so important in the development of voluntary service.

The gap between the affluent and the poor in the United States is wider now than ever before. Poor children in the United States have lower family incomes than poor children in many other industrial countries, with even countries where average incomes are much lower than ours managing to do better for their youth than the United States (McLoyd, 1998). Coinciding with rising income inequality in this country has been the increasing migration of the nation’s poor into cities at the same time the affluent have migrated out of the cities. More than 75% of the poor in the United States live in metropolitan areas (Massey, 1996). As these poor have increasingly made cities their homes, they have tended to move into already poor neighborhoods (Massey).


The concentration of poverty and income inequality in American cities has severely affected the ability of individuals living in these areas to generate social capital, such as informal associations, civic participation, norms of reciprocity, and trust in others, that facilitates cooperation for mutual benefit (Putnam, 1996; Kawa- chi, Kennedy, Lochner, & Prothrow-Stith, 1997). Communities lacking in social capital and community attachment place children living in these neighborhoods at special risk (Hawkins, 1995) and cannot provide the wide range of institutions that allow adolescents to experiment with moral identities.

Wilson (1987, 1991, 1997) emphasizes the significance of decreasing social capital on the socioeconomic integrity of Black neighborhoods, where the concentration of poverty due to the out-migration of the more affluent has been especially profound. As the working- and middle-class Blacks leave these neighborhoods, they take with them key structural resources such as conventional role models for neighborhood children (Wilson, 199 1). Opportunities to interact with nonparent adults improve life chances for children and adolescents, and in the analyses we reported earlier, increased the likelihood that adolescents would join social institutions such as teams and clubs. However, these opportunities are in short supply in urban, minority communities because of the factors noted above, and even programs designed to offer these opportunities are strained beyond capacity. For example, for some urban neighborhoods it is impossible to recruit enough volunteers for extremely successful programs like Big BrothersBig Sisters (Mendel, 1996).

Not only is social capital at a premium in urban, minority neighborhoods, but fiscal resources are as well. For example, in Camden, New Jersey, the site of much of our work, the school district spends less per pupil on extracurricular activities than 99% of the school districts in the state. This means that a city with enormous unmet need for opportunities for adolescents to become involved in social institutions lacks both the social capital and the financial resources necessary to offer structured opportunities to adolescents.

The problem, then, is clear: Urban, minority neighborhoods lack the social capital and financial resources necessary to offer enough opportunities to adolescents for attachment to society and exploration of moral identities. Given that minority adolescents value moral goals highly, that minority adolescents can, when given the opportunity, make important contributions to the welfare of the community, and that many urban, minority adolescents are in genuine need of the protective advantages that the formation of moral identities confer, the failure of society to provide growth-promoting opportunities is deeply discouraging.

In Search of a Solution

Although the problem is clear, the solution is not; we offer no simple answer to the question of how to provide poor, urban, minority adolescents with more opportunities so important in the development of a moral identity. Clearly, financial


investment can address parts of the problem. For example, there is no good reason that extracurricular activities should be funded at higher levels in suburban school districts than in urban districts where the need is clearly greater.

Although increased funding is necessary and helpful, money by itself cannot resolve the problem, because adolescents need opportunities to explore roles that can only be modeled by responsible persons who are usually acting in the context of social institutions. Consequently, we see no other option than to ask adults and institutions in impoverished areas to expand their missions to include support for the development of moral identity in adolescents. Many of the institutions that remain in urban areas work hard to offer support for their communities and to offer opportunities for their adolescents. In Camden, for example, churches have been particularly successful in supporting adolescents’ explorations of work designed to help others, and many of the care exemplars described earlier were introduced to community action by their churches. But churches are under tremendous pressure to provide a range of resources to urban communities, and consequently there remains a genuine need for others to provide support to adolescents.

Our view is that other urban institutions should assume part of the responsibility for providing opportunities for moral identities to develop. Community service in schools, for example, may be one way to provide institutional support for the articulation of moral identities (e.g., Youniss & Yates, 1997). We have high hopes that institutions that typically have not done much to support development can be transformed in ways that will help adolescents grow in beneficial ways. For example, youth sports offer a tremendous opportunity to influence adolescents. Through sports one can reach adolescents who are not academically talented, adolescents who do not volunteer for service clubs in a high school, and so on. Moreover, sports can serve to bring together groups of adolescents who do not otherwise associate with one another to work toward a common cause. Finally, the adults who work with adolescents in sports are volunteers, or so lowly paid that they are essentially volunteers: Most of these adults report that their actions reflect their concern for youth.

In our program in Camden, STARR (Sports Teaching Adolescents Responsi- bility and Resiliency), we try to allow sports to realize its potential for supporting healthy development. In particular, we want adolescents to recognize that they can make meaningful, responsible contributions to their communities. Toward that end, we arrange for the teams in the league to do some type of community service in Camden. We also try to support the developmental potential of sports by training the adult volunteer coaches to model the kinds of behavior that they want the adolescent athletes to emulate, and provide ample opportunity for the adults to form relationships with the adolescents by offering a year-round program of activities. Finally, we emphasize the responsibility that adolescents have to each other: We expect the older kids to make sure that the young kids get home safely after practice; we ask that everyone work to keep the chaos of bus rides to a minimum; and we rely upon the adolescents to help us plan the future of the program.


Our point, however, is not that the STARR program is the answer to the question of how the development of moral identity can be supported. Instead, what we want to emphasize is that although our model of the formation of moral identity posits a role for enduring influences on adolescent development, moral identities can be nurtured and fostered by institutions as well. Particularly in low-income urban areas, where the need for support is so great and the resources so few, we believe that institutions that work with youth should be supported in their efforts to provide opportunities to adolescents to explore moral life.

These opportunities will promote the life prospects of adolescents and allow them to participate as citizens in their communities. Adolescents are too often viewed as a drain on community resources; for example, current social policy seems shaped by the perception that urban youth are best viewed as potential criminals and unwed teen parents. As we noted earlier, however, urban youth seek justice, desire to make their communities better, and can make genuine contributions to the health of their communities. These goals and action toward them draw people into the social networks necessary to nourish and renew political democracy, as Tocqueville (1966) perceived a century ago. In communities drained of social capital, adolescents can contribute to the renewal of trust, neighborhood networks, and connection to social institutions that make for successful social life.

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DANIEL HART received his Ed.D. from the Laboratory of Human Development, Harvard University. He is now Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. His research interests focus on moral development, the sense of self, and personality, particularly in urban youth.

ROBERT ATKINS obtained an MSN at Rutgers University. He is now a School Nurse at East Camden Middle School in Camden, New Jersey. He is interested in the promotion of physical and psychological health in low-income, minority youth.

DEBRA FORD obtained her B.A. from Rutgers University. She is a graduate student in Social Psychology at Northeastern University. She studies the social processes that contribute to effective community action in urban communities.

Urban America as a Context for the Development of Moral Identity in Adolescence

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