The assumption presented in this study is that there are significant moral dimensions in commercial television programing. A concern for these dimensions has appeared as aspects of empirical and interpretive studies in the television literature, but there has been a paucity of systematic studies in this area. The purpose of this study is threefold: to discern and describe the content and quality of the moral/value dimensions in selected television episodes, to evaluate a methodology for such an examination, and to provide a model for future investigations in this area. The generic methodology adopted for this study is content analysis, a qualitative approach which permits the researcher to determine the characteristics of a phenomenon, the forms it assumes, and the variations it displays. The methodology requires the establishment of a coding system to categorize the content of the phenomenon studied. The three-level/six-stage moral reasoning schema developed by Lawrence Kohlberg was utilized to categorize reasoning judgments, and a moral/value questions schema was specially designed for this study to categorize those external factors and relationships which influence behavior, to describe the generator of the dilemma/conflict, and to interpret the moral nature of the resolution
