The gender in the production of research in moral development psychology: mapping and analysis in international english-language journals (1982-2018)

Abstract

The moral theories of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, arised of the field of studies of Moral Development Psychology, field marked by the modern science project, generated androcentric, sexist and heteronormative interpretations about human development. The feminist critiques of science provoked epistemic ruptures by interrogating this positioning of the field production and respective theories, making them revise themselves and look for methodological and conceptual alternatives. Thus, the objective of this research project, linked to a larger research program, is to gather, map and analyze, in English-language journals, the international production of research in Moral Development Psychology that has gender as theme in the period from 1982 to 2018. As a methodological course, we will use the bibliographic research for theoretical foundation in the topics addressed and, for the apprehension of the international literature in periodicals, here the corpus of analysis of the research, will be added two methodological techniques of specific research: the state of the art and meta-research. With the technique of state of the art, we will seek to gather and, consequently, to map, from the database query, the pertinent production (scientific articles) in the making of research instruments, highlighting the title of the articles, authorship, abstract, keywords, among other relevant aspects. Subsequent to this, the meta-research technique will be used to analyze the content of the materials gathered and mapped by the state of the art. Therefore, with this combination of the two techniques, a map will be drawn on whether, how and how much the Moral Development Psychology has appropriated itself in the research of the feminist epistemes in the international plane, and thus situate the investigated production so as to know 1) if and how it appropriates the concept of gender; 2) whether and with what or which feminist orientations it has; and (3) whether and how the moral theories that founded them are questioned by feminist epistemes.