ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews recent research on the Defining Issues Test (DIT), developed in the early 1970s by James Rest as a paper-and-pencil alternative to Lawrence Kohlberg’s own semistructured interview measure of moral judgment development (Rest, 1979). Heavily influenced by Kohlberg’s six-stage theory of moral reasoning (see Lapsley, chap. 2, this volume), Rest developed the DIT as an assessment of how adolescents and adults come to understand and interpret moral issues. Like Kohlberg, Rest viewed moral judgment development as a social and cognitive construct that followed a developmental progression from a narrow self-focused interpretation of moral issues, through an understanding of the broader socialworld and associated group-based claims onmoral decisions, to a reliance on postconventional moral principles. Rest viewed the cognitive features of moral judgments as central to an understanding of moral actions and emotions. At its conception, therefore, the DIT was designed to assess Kohlberg’s developmental sequence and contribute to the development of moral judgment theory in adolescent and adult populations.
