RESEARCH REPORT NO.21                            "Morality of Thai Youth"                                                by                                Duangduen Bhanthumanvin                             Penlhae Prachonpachanuk (1976) 1. Origin of the project :         At present, Thailand is undergoing developmental changes in all areas. The most important area, whichwill make other changes more effective is the area of population development. However, populationdevelopment has not been given adequate attention due to the lack of information on the natures of the Thaipeoples and their societies Since morality is the pre – requisite for good citizenship and democratic actions,therefore, moral education and training should be one of the first tasks in the population developmentprogram.         This research project was designed to investigate the nature of morality of Thai youth. The researchobjectives were twofolded, First, it was aimed at discovering the nature of development of morality in varioustypes of Thai youths, and comparing the normal characteristics of the educated young people who came fromdifferent sectors of the Thai society, and received different types of child-rearing practices. A field study wasconducted to find the relationships among these variables, Secondly, this project aimed at discovering thecausal relationships between some situational characteristics and cheating behavior of male adolescents. Inaddition, the effects of the interaction between the situational influences and personal moral characteristics oncheating behavior were also examined, A laboratory experiment was conducted to find evidences of thesecausal relationships. 2. Scope and methodology :         In the field study, over one thousand and four hundred school and university – students completed sets ofquestionnaires designed to assess the followings : level of moral resoning (based on Kohlberg’s theory ofmoral development) future orientation, verbal skill, social characteristics and four typr types of child-rearingpractices. The age of the male and female respondents ranged from 11 to 25 years. All of them were living inBangkok at the time. The data were analyzed by using various statistical methods in a high – power computer.Many interesting and significant findings were obtained which will be mentioned in the next section.         In the laboratory experiment, three hundred male adolescents (ages ranged from 13 to 15 years) wereinvited to play a game in which they were tempted to cheat to win a prize. Half of these adolescents were toldthat they would receive the prize at the end of the game. The other half was told that they had to wait for twoweeks before the prizes would be distributed to the winners. Then each type of subjects were further dividedinto five groups. The first four groups encountered a model who did not cheat in the game. For any group ofsubjects this model appeared to be one of the four types as follow : a shame model who felt glad about notcheating, a guilt model who felt glad about not cheating, a shame model who felt sad about not cheating, anda guilt model who felt sad about not cheating. The fifth group of subjects met a university student who did notmention about his own behavior while playing the game. There ewer many dependent variables in thisexperiment. The data on cheating behavior were analyzed by the use of chi-Square Tests. The continousvariables were analyzed by using the three – factor Analysis of Varianee with factorial designs. The matrices ofcorrelation coefficients of all the dependent variables were also computed. 3. Important research findings :         In the field study, it was found as expected that the students who came from lower class family showedslower rate of moral development than the students from other socio-economic classes. However, the lowerclass students could catch up with others when they were in the last few years of highschool and in theuniversity. On the other hand, it was contrary to expectation to find that older respondents were less futureoriented than younger ones. This evidence suggested that there may be two age groups with low futureorientation instead of one, namely the young children group and the middle adolescent group.         Child rearing practices were found to have significant contributions toward the development of moralreasoning and future orientations. The respondents who reported that they came from a high love-orientedand high-reasoning family showed high level of moral reasoning. Furthermore, love-oriented, reasoning andpsychological punishment methods were positively related to future orientation. These three types ofchild-rearing practices together with the control-oriented practice were the four aspects of a democratichome. The results from the field study showed that democratic environment was necessary for the lower classchildren to develop high level of morality. In addition, moderately high control rather than high permissivenessshould be practiced in these families.         The experimental results revealed as hypotesized, that the situational characteristics exerted differentialinfluence on cheating behavior of the male adolescents. That is, in the situations where rewarding would beimmediate, and the well-behaved in great number. However, in the delayed-reward situation, and themodel-present situation, the high moral scorers cheated significanty less than the low moral scorers,Furthermore, the guilt model who showed higher level of morality than the shame model could induced morehonest behavior in these adolescents. In addition, for some types of adolescents, the shame model was onmore effective in inducing honesty than no-model.         Interesting patterns of relationships between moral reasoning, future orientation and cheating behaviorwere found, more specifically, among the low moral scorers the ones with low future orientation score cheatedless than the ones with high score, in most of the experimental conditions. On the contrary, when the highmoral scorer were examined, the ones with high future orientation score cheated less than the ones with highfuture orientation were consonant with the results in an American study. In addition, cheating behavior of theThai adolescents in this experiment was found to relate to their moral attitudes and their anxiety. Morespecifically, the subjects who cheated in the experimental game did not appreciate honesty and other virtuesas much, and were more anxious than the ones who did not cheat. 4. Possible applications :         Since the present research project yielded some basic informations on the nature of morality of the Thaiyouth, many possible applications of these results are suggested as follow :         Academic area : Since the present research project has been an original study and the research reportcontains an extensive review of the research literature in the area of morality, high academic value is evident.The research findings are academic knowledge which can be included in many courses in developmentaland social psychology especially the ones given in Thailand. The research report itself can also be used forsupplementary reading in these courses. New ideas for further research on Thai morality have also beensuggested.         Child-rearing area : The results from the field study strongly suggested that child-rearing practices orfamilial environments were important for the development of morality in the Thai youth. Democraticenvironment can be created by the use of the four methods of child-rearing, namely, love-oriented, reasoning,psychological punishment and control-oriented. Thus, the present research findings can be used as evidenceto inform parents, in order to improve their methods of child rearing.         Moral education area : This research project can be seen as a research evaluation of moral training andmoral education in the Thai society. The findings have also suggested the ways to improve the effectiveness ofmoral education’s program. The experimental results pointed to the fact that moral education program whichconcentrates only on the training of moral attitude is inadequate in producing good citizenship and democraticactions. An effective program of moral education should consist of three types of ego-strength, and thetraining of wholesome moral attitudes. This research report has included detailed descriptions of the nature ofmoral development in different age group.         Population and social development areas : The experimental findings have stressed the facts thatpersonal characteristics are secondary in importance in influencing moral behavior of the individuals. It wasfound that the characteristics of the tempting situation exerted much stronger influence on the behavior of theindividual. Thus the training for high morality can be of some benefits to the society only when the socialenvironment can elicit moral responses and moral actions from the highly moral individuals. On the otherhand, morality theorists have been convinced that only moral society can breed moral members. Therefore, itis the duty of all social agents to build the Thai social conditions which will facilitate the population’sdevelopment of morality.                                SWUHOMEPAGEBack to Behavioral Science Research Institute