7;s (1995) claims that women tend to present dilemmas of a more relational nature.Lyons’s (1983) study shows strong support for Gilligan’s hypothesis however. Lyons (1983) conducted open-ended interviews on 36 participants (18 male, 18 female) ranging from the ages 8-60+ and asked them to discuss a personal real-life moral dilemma that they had faced. Results showed that the care consideration was predominant for 75% of females and that the justice orientation was predominant for 79% of males. Pratt (1985) replicated this pattern in his study of 62 participants. He found that 53.6% of women held a predominantly care orientation and 73.5% of men showed a rights consideration.Gilligan (1986,a, p.10) claims that most people ’focus on one orientation and minimally represent the others.’ This claim however has little empirical evidence to support it. To this test single orientation consistency Walker (1989) adopted an arbitrary criterion of 75% (Same as the criterion adopted by Gilligan and Anttanucci, (1988b)) , his results show that approximately 50% of participants met this criterion when examining a single real-life dilemma. Gilligan and Anttanucci, (1988b) reprted that only 66.3% met this criterion. Pratt, Golding and Sampson (1988) found only 60% of participants used the same modal orientation when asked to discuss two real-life moral dilemmas. Whilst Gilligan’s claim of single modal orientation consistency may not be strongly supported what is evident from the research is that both care and justice orientations exist. Whether these reasons are due to gender differences or not is debatable.Lollis, Ross and Leroux (1996) found that in dialogues between parents and children during sibling sharing disputes mothers tended to make more comments regarding caring and feeling, whereas fathers made more comments about justice and rights. Comments were made regardless of the sex of the child. Is this perhaps an exp...
