The Comparison of Moral Reasoning within Similar Sport and Social Contexts

An important part of the University is to transmit the values of society. Recently, there has been advocacy for higher education to be more accountable in providing avenues for moral development of students. Sport has become one avenue that was put forth as a setting for such moral development. Literature though has been discouraging in the use of sport for moral reasoning. Most of the research, has been focused on varsity level sport. With the focus on higher profile sports, there are many levels of sport within the University that have been overlooked, including club sport. The purpose of this project is to explore if a club sport athlete’s moral reasoning in sport situations has a relationship to their moral reasoning in daily life situations. As in past literature, this research sought to compare moral reasoning in and out of the sport setting. The moral reasoning in sport instrument most commonly utilized, the HBVCI, contains everyday sport scenarios for a respondent to consider. In the interest of providing a comparable instrument that contained daily life everyday scenarios, a new instrument, the DLMD, was constructed to contain daily life situations similar to each of the HBVCI’s sport scenarios. With the use of the HBVCI and the newly constructed DLMD, the findings suggest that the longer an individual participates in club sport, the higher their moral reasoning. This is contradictory to the majority of the research within collegiate varsity sport. With this finding, this dissertation also introduced a framework for explaining that club sport may have a different effect on individual’s moral reasoning, potentially due to its democratic setting