Sammanfattning
Moral development among students and professionals within health and nursing should be an important issue in nursing education. There are instruments described in the literature that measure moral development, but none have been found that are developed in a Nordic context. The aim of this article is to describe shortly the development of the «Moral Development Scale for Professionals (MDSP)», which is based on Kohlberg's theory of moral development, and to describe some results from using the scale. The instrument was developed through a series of tests among nursing and teacher students in Norway. The results showed positive evidence of usability and fairly good psychometric properties for the instrument. When using the instrument in a longitudinal study among students in the bachelor nursing program, no change in moral development was found between the first and last year. Pedagogical consequences of this should be that especially the ethics education must be more integrated in the different subjects in the program in order to better facilitate the students’ moral abstractions and unbiased thinking grounded in universal ethical principles of justice.