The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture

Dolgin opens the chapter with a personal note: she added it to this edition because values lie at the centre of a person's self-concept — they shape whom we help, which career we choose, even whether we go to a boxing match. She then moves to the classic starting point, Piaget. Piaget watched children playing and asked whether game rules could be changed; in another study he told them stories, asking, for example, whether a child who broke one cup on purpose was naughtier than one who broke several by accident. The result: children move from a «morality of constraint» (rules as adult decree) to a «morality of cooperation» (rules as agreement), and from judging by consequences to judging by intentions. The book's useful addition is that some adults never complete this shift — they obey the law not from conscience but from fear of being caught.

Kohlberg is at the heart of the chapter. In his 1963 study, 72 boys aged 10, 13 and 16 were given ten moral dilemmas; the most famous is the one about a man called «Hans» in the Turkish translation (Heinz in the English literature): the drug that could save his wife costs 200 dollars to make, the pharmacist asks 2,000, Hans can raise only 1,000 and one night he steals it. The book rightly stresses that for Kohlberg what matters is not the answer but the reasoning behind it: the same «he should have stolen it» can come from fear of punishment or from a universal moral principle. The three levels and six stages — punishment, instrumental purpose, «good child», law and order, social contract, universal principles — are illustrated with sample answers to the Hans dilemma, and stage six with Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

What makes the textbook valuable is that after presenting a theory it opens it up to critique. Are Kohlberg's stages universal? His research in Taiwan, a Turkish village, Britain, Canada and the US, and later a review of 75 studies in 23 countries, show that the first four stages are universal, but the last two develop only in urbanised or formally educated settings where people meet conflicting views. Are the stages really sequential? Kohlberg and Kramer observed some participants «regressing» from stage 4 to stage 2. Doesn't stage six reflect liberal political thinking — are liberals «more moral» than conservatives? The book says openly that there is little evidence for that.

The most serious critique concerns gender, and here Carol Gilligan comes to the fore: Kohlberg's scoring system was built only from male responses and systematically «left» women at stage 3. According to Gilligan, men emphasise justice (rights, laws, principles) and women emphasise care and responsibility towards others. Dolgin is measured here too: she compares Gilligan's alternative levels with Kohlberg's stages in a table and then shows that Gilligan was also criticised — later research indicates that both men and women use both orientations, the difference is small and depends more on whether the dilemma is personal. An «In Their Own Words» box, in which a woman realises while reading Gilligan that her mother lived like «the family's servant», brings the academic debate to life.

The chapter's contemporary section is the social-cognitive domain model: rules come in three kinds — moral (not harming others), conventional (burping after a meal is rude in one culture and a compliment in another) and personal choices (clothes colour, taste in music, hair length). A practical lesson for parents follows: teenagers usually agree with their parents on core moral issues such as stealing being wrong; the arguments are mostly about whether something is a «social convention» or a «personal choice». Next come ten factors that influence prosocial behaviour — puberty, perspective-taking, moral reasoning, empathy, personality, self-esteem, family, peers, education, culture — followed by a detailed look at the family's role (warmth, acceptance, discipline, modelling, autonomy).

In the end this chapter reflects the quality of the whole book: theories are presented in plain language, with everyday examples and scientific critique; marginal glossaries, «Q&A» boxes and end-of-chapter discussion questions strengthen its textbook function. The weaknesses are visible too: the translation has typos and oddities such as «Heinz» becoming «Hans», most sources date from the 1990s–2000s, and some chapters (especially chapter 3 on ethnic minorities) are entirely US-based. Even so, such a comprehensive and balanced textbook on adolescent psychology is rare in Turkish.

• Marginal glossaries of key terms in every chapter
• «Q&A», «In Their Own Words» and «Research Highlights» boxes
• A scientific critique section after each theory
• Chapter summaries and discussion questions, plus a large index