Just curious. Is her research considered important or not?
Well, I would be surprised if anyone can call her “Professor Gilligan” without giggling like an eight-year-old, which cannot help her career.
Not in a good light. She never published her research in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Instead, she wrote a book and hit the talk-show circuit. Therefore, who’s to say she didn’t just make it all up? Or made tons of mistakes in her experiments? Aside from that, she used incredibly small samples in her experiments which could implicate her findings as not generalizable to the population as a whole but rather the result of an irregular sample. Additionally, studies have shown that there is minimal if any difference in scores between men and women on Kohlberg’s scale.
IMHO: Her theories are not without merit, but it seems to me that she either just wanted fame (hence writing a book and going on TV instead of doing it through the proper channels) or discovered after conducting her experiments that there wasn’t enough evidence to back up her theories, at least not enough for other psychologists, so she wrote a book to convince the public (and fill her wallet) instead.
Yes she did.
Carol Gilligan, “In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and Morality,” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 47, 1977, p. 484.
http://www.hepg.org/page/23: “Please note that Harvard Education Press is a peer-reviewed press”
The BOOK, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard U Press, 1982) was more for mass market consumption.
In my opinion, her academic article was far better, but maybe she was lured into taking a stance that she originally had not taken: in the academic paper, the notion of an “ethics of care” was used as an illustration of how Kohlberg’s methodology (deriving a standard from males, then applying that same standard to both males and females, then concluding that the females he had studied has a less developed sense of ethics) was flawed by the gendered way in which he had derived his standard to begin with. Her article was not so much “WOMEN AND MEN ARE DIFFFFFERENT!!!” as “Yo, dude, you haven’t developed a yardstick for assessing the development of ethical consideration, you’ve developed a MALE yardstick, and maybe, just possibly, females in our culture develop ethical thinking via a different developmental channel”.
I admit I don’t care for the book. In addition to the above shift in tone and emphasis, it’s just plain over-padded.
I stand corrected. I apologize for not doing more thorough research and instead relying on my memory prior to posting. However, the three studies on which that article and her book is based, have not been peer-reviewed or released. She has outright refused to release her data.