Does Moral and Social Conventional Reasoning Predict British Young People's Judgments About the Rights of Asylum-Seeker Youth?

Abstract

Since the nearly universal ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (U.N. General Assembly, ), children's rights have received increasing empirical attention. While there is an established body of research on how youth view their own rights, few studies have examined their views about the rights of out-group members. Employing a social-cognitive domain approach, the current study investigated British young people's (N = 260) views regarding the rights of asylum seekers. The data come from a secondary analysis of interviews on British young people's views about the religious and nonreligious rights of asylum seeker youth. Rather than being influenced by broader variables such as age, participants' judgments, and reasoning took into account the features of the specific rights situation under consideration. Moreover, the use of moral justifications was related to endorsing the rights of asylum seekers while social conventional justifications pertained to rejecting asylum seeker's rights. The implications for theory, future research and social policy are discussed. © 2014 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.