Qualitative Study On The Development Of Childreni’s Altruistic Behavior

Altruistic behavior is a kind of prosocial behavior that altruists pay a certain price and benefit others,which is closely related to the development of moral understanding as well as the improvement of moral level,and is an important content in social learning.Focusing on the role played by the family,the study explores the development process of altruistic behavior during the children’s growing up and the main influential factors on it.In the study which based on the principle of information saturation,18 parents(12 parents of boys and 6 parents of girls)and 5 children were interviewed,and nine children were observed.These Children were from kindergarten to the third grade of primary school,and aged between 4 and 10 years old.During the interview,more than 100,000 words were transcribed.After adopting qualitative method to analyze the interview data in the way of situational and generic analyses,the study finds that the process of children’s altruistic behavior can be divided into four stages: imitation,cognitive identity,externalization and internalization.In the imitation stage,altruistic behavior is passive because children are unconscious of the learning,and rarely consider altruistic behavior.In the stage of cognitive identity,children do not have direct,explicit altruistic behavior,but they have already thought about altruistic behavior.The externalization stage of the altruistic behavior is initiated by children which is a visible behavior in real life.The internalization stage of the altruistic behavior is a common and habitual behavior of children,which marks the formation of altruistic behavior habits of children.These four stages of children’s altruistic behavior are gradual and progressive,but they may not strictly follow the process of development,which means that the order of stages is variable and not fixed.Based on the interviews,this study found that children not only consider their own convenience,but also were influenced by attitudes and behavior of recipient such as honorific.The motivation and result of children’s altruistic behavior were further discussed.The result found that altruism and egoism are two different starting points of children’s altruistic behavior.However,the behavior results are a win-win situation for altruists and recipients.It is not recommended to emphasize this division too much,when discussing the altruistic behavior of children.Parents should be models and take the characteristics of the children’s cognitive development into consideration depended on the rules of altruistic behavior in the process of children’s formative education.On the other hand,parents should encourage children’s all forms of altruistic behavior at the right time.