Children's concept of rules and their judgments on crime and punishment

Turiel (1983) has documented in his studies that children judge rules differently based on different social domains. The aim of this research is to investigate how children evaluate rule violations and domain undifferentiated punishments encountered in schools and how they judge the punishments given by teachers for these situations. Additionally, students are asked to provide alternative ways for the behaviors mentioned in the stories, offering suggestions to teachers. As data collection tools, participants were initially asked four questions about their perceptions of class rules, and they were required to justify their answers. Subsequently, participants were engaged in semi-structured clinical interviews by reading six different hypothetical stories created from three social domains. The participant group of the research consists of 60 primary school students aged 6-9. The findings of the study indicate that young children (6-7 years old) perceive rules as more unchangeable compared to older children (8-9 years old). Consistent with previous studies, moral transgressions were found to be less acceptable compared to social-conventional and prudential domains.