The Developmental Research Of Children's Responsibility In The Viewpoint Of The Relationship Of Responsibility

Responsibility, also known as the sense of responsibility, is the individual's cognition of the responsibility of their own role in the social life, as well as the resulting emotional experience and behavior. It includes three psychological components: cognition, emotion and behavior. Responsibility is the important element of the individual's social development, and moreover, is one of the core qualities a citizen must have.At present, the rapid development of science and technology has been changing ways of living, thinking and communicating, in an unprecedented depth and breadth. This change makes those familiar and easy problems in the past become diversified, complicated, and unclear. Kinds of social problems emerge from this context, as well as the spread of negative thinking, and then, children's understanding, feeling and the practice of responsibility are likely to be influenced, too. So, this research, in the viewpoint of the relationship of responsibility, probed into Grade 2, 4, 6, 8 students'self-responsibility, social responsibility and environmental responsibility by individual interviews.Study 1 examined 241 students'understanding of responsibility in the way of"completing sentence". The results showed: (1) 241 subjects'understanding of responsibility could be classified as six categories: label-orientation, feature-orientation, task-orientation, care-orientation, authority-orientation and environment-orientation.Overall, task-orientation shared the highest proportion of subjects, followed by care-orientation. Label-orientation shared the lowest proportion of subjects, followed by environment-orientation; (2) In general, self-responsibility and social responsibility were prevalent in the understanding of responsibility, while environmental responsibility had no popularity.Study 2, by the projection of situational story, explored all students'cognitive judgment, emotional experience and behavioral tendency, within self-responsibility, social responsibility and environmental responsibility. The results showed: (1)In all stories, the subjects'response were not consistent between cognitive judgment and behavioral tendency(except the story of environmental responsibility).In contrast, the subjects'response were consistent between behavioral tendency and emotional experience;(2) All subjects'reasoning of responsibility could be classified as six categories: authority-orientation, self-orientation, approbation-orientation, cost-orientation, empathy-orientation and principle-orientation. And in the story of self-responsibility, the distribution of authority-orientation appeared significant difference in grades; (3) Compared to self-responsibility and social responsibility, the formation of environmental responsibility was more likely to be dependent on one certain level of cognitive ability, and thus, the development of environmental responsibility delayed relatively; (4) Compared to the similar study in 1985, the transition phase from authority-orientation to principle-orientation, was much more complex in the cognition of social responsibility of this study, and the appearance of cost-orientation was one of complexity, which was related to the change of the socio-cultural factors.Based on the above results, in order to improve the positive development of children's responsibility, this study combined with the characteristics of the background of the times, and offered several points for responsibility education, such as, integrating different educational resources of community, schools, families; adjusting the values of responsibility education, and so on.