Organized by Betül Zeyrek

Advancing Research on the Personal Domain: Context, Culture, and New Directions

How do children and parents determine what counts as a matter of personal choice, and where are the boundaries of parental authority? How do cultural and contextual factors play a role in what children and parents consider personal? These questions are important within social-cognitive domain theory and personal choice research. Although distinctions among moral, conventional, and personal issues are central to the framework, the personal domain remains comparatively underexamined, particularly in early to middle childhood and across diverse cultural and contextual settings. This symposium brings together researchers examining how children and parents negotiate personal issues, how cultural values influence personal choice judgments, and how multifaceted issues influence parents' and children's reasoning about choice.

By integrating developmental, cultural, and methodological perspectives, the symposium aims to advance theoretical clarity around the personal domain and to foster discussion of new directions for research on autonomy development within and beyond the social domain theory tradition.