Moral reasoning in adolescent offenders: A meta-analytic review

Background: Moral reasoning and its association with various types of behavior have been the subject of many studies in Psychology. Specifically, moral reasoning has been widely related to juvenile delinquency in the research about the subject. Objectives: this review integrates more than 70 years of scientific research into the differences in moral reasoning between adolescent offenders and non-offenders with a view to elucidating the relationship between moral reasoning and juvenile delinquency with provision for the potential moderating effect of demographic and methodological variables. Method: We conducted a meta-analytic review whose target population was young offenders between 11 and 20 years old. Results: A search for literature on the target topic retrieved a total of 72 studies with a moderated effect size (r = -.336). The most salient finding was that effect sizes were significant for all subgroups of moderating variables. Conclusions: This result suggests a powerful relationship between moral reasoning and officially recorded juvenile delinquency that cannot be exclusively ascribed to sociodemographic or methodological variables. There remain some unsolved challenges in this field, however, which are briefly commented on.