Section A of this coding manual uses conceptualizations by Carol Gilligan and colleagues to identify rights and care reasoning (Brown et al., “Reading for Self and Moral Voice;” “Coding Manual,” Gender, Education, and Human Development Study Center; Lyons, “Two Perspectives”). Throughout the manual we are mindful that the “distinction between justice and care cuts across the familiar divisions between thinking and feeling, egoism and altruism, and theoretical and practical reasoning by reconstructing the meaning of these terms” (Brown et al., “Reading for Self and Moral Voice,” 4). After the Coding Manual was developed, it was sent to Carol Gilligan, Jane Attanucci, and Kay Johnston from whom we received helpful comments.

What is being measured in the Coding Manual is not discrete words but a point of view, a way of seeing moral problems. Often words like “justice,” “truth,” “obligation,” and “fairness” are employed by attorneys with either orientation. These words may mean different things to the individual, depending on the underlying orientation that organizes moral perceptions. Even though the “lawyer talk” of rights and justice frequently appears in all the interviews, these words mean different things to different people. (See particularly Chapter 3 for examples.)

After having been trained to understand and identify rights and care orientations in narratives, coders relied on the following manual in order to code the interviews.