Copyright Malvin Porter, Jr. 2010 - acumen - The University of ...

aggression and that they differentiate between physical and relational aggression in their moral
judgments. Girls are more morally sensitive to the effects of relational aggressive; whereas, boys
are more morally sensitive physical aggression.
Recommendations for Future Research
There is still much to learn about the factors that influence children’s thinking about bully
victimization. With this in mind, the following recommendations are made for future research
related to this study.
First, modifications need to be made to the CBVS. To start, children need to be clearly
instructed to select an action that they would most likely take if they were the story character.
Second, children should also be instructed to choose the most right or moral action. Next, the
justification categories need to be refined and a fourth category needs to be added called
Aggressive/Retaliatory Justifications such as “I’m doing this to get back at the mean kids” or “I
have a right to get back at the mean kids.”
Future analysis should make use of a within story design such that each child’s responses
will be analyzed within each story. This will give four data sets for each child participant; the
fact that child participants will act as their own control should provides a way of reducing the
amount of error arising from natural variance between individual children. One advantage will be
that children can be evaluated within each of the four story types in order to study the effect that
each story has on children’s Action Choice responses and their Justification Choice responses.
Additionally, within-story design increases statistical power and reduces error variance
associated with individual differences such as children’s moods or task variables (e.g., time of
day, temperature in the room), which will differ across levels of the independent variable.
Statistical efficiency of within-story design makes it easier to detect differences across the levels
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