The All-Sports Ministry of PA NJ & DE - Executive Summary Start-Up Budget & Prospectus

CIRCLE Working Paper 44: February 2006
Sports, Youth and Character: A Critical Survey
development.” 160
By the next year, however, they had shifted to
a different developmental account based on
the work of Norma Haan. Haan formulated her
theory explicitly in opposition to Kohlberg’s,
which portrayed the moral agent as embracing
increasingly general and abstract moral principles
as he matures. To this Kohlbergian picture – which,
in her view reflected only the process of “learned
sophistication” – Haan counterposed another:
that of the agent in a particular, concrete context
with a specific problem to solve. As Bredemeier
and Shields present Haan, morality consists of
conflict, balance, and the transition from the first
to the second by means of dialogue. “Together we
create moral agreements,” writes Bredemeier. 161
Balance is reached, Shields and Bredemeier go on
to note, when “all parties involved in a relationship
are in basic agreement about respective rights,
obligations, and privileges.” 162
The ability to take part in the “dialogic” process
that creates agreements evolves through phases
or orientations. In the assimilative phase, “moral
balances are egocentrically constructed.” 163
“Others’ interests and needs are not given
equal consideration to the self.” 164 In the
accommodative phase, individuals “subordinate
their needs and interests to those of others.” 165
Finally, in the equilibration phase, “all interests and
needs [are coordinated] in an attempt to optimize
situationally specific potentialities for mutually
satisfying responses to interpersonal difficulties.” 166
To associate athletes’ level of moral thinking with
aggression, the former has to be measured. In
a 1994 study of children at a camp, Bredemeier
explained her measurement procedure:
The children’s moral reasoning level was
assessed by means of 45-minute individual
interviews. . . . [Each] interview consisted of
four moral dilemmas, two set in sport contexts
and two reflecting daily life situations. . . .
One sport and one life situation featured a
girl forced to choose between honesty and
keeping a promise to a girlfriend. The second
set of sport and life stories featured boys faced
with a decision about whether to risk hurting
another boy to prevent him from continuing
an unfair activity. Each dilemma was followed
by a standard set of probe questions, with
the interviewer free to ask additional probes
to obtain clarifications. . . . The research
associates who interviewed subjects . . . had
previously completed a semester-long training
program on Haan’s interactional model of
morality and the techniques of structural
scoring. . . . Each rater assigned a major and
minor score to each story. The major score
reflected [the] moral level that most closely
corresponded to the underlying structure of
the reasoning offered, while the minor score
reflected secondary themes presented by the
respondent. 167
Beyond this assurance that the scorers were “welltrained,”
Bredemeier supplied the reader with no
further illumination. Yet the scoring enterprise
must have involved a great deal of subjectivity.
Unlike application of the DIT, where scoring is
pretty mechanical, or even use of the Kohlbergian
Standard Issue Moral Judgment Interview, where
the scorer is constrained by an elaborate formula,
in an interactional morality interview the scorer has
enormous latitude. “Because interactional moral
performance is thought to be creative,” writes
Haan, “the [scoring] manual does not predetermine
the formulations that will be scored.” 168 The
moral performance is “creative” because moral
agents in any situation are (in Bredemeier’s words)
negotiating “interpersonal difficulties or potential
conflicts of interest.” 169 The outcome of the
performance is not governed by an antecedent
principle but constructed from the situation-specific
materials at hand. This means that assessing the
moral level of an interview-subject’s response has
to be a highly interpretive affair, and consequently
depends on the assessor’s own grasp of morality
and its demands. “[O]nly the complexity of
another human’s mind,” declares Haan, “has a
chance of encompassing and fathoming the critical
meanings” in the subject’s response. 170 Now,
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