Based on participants' reading of stories with characters who varied in personal characteristics (popularity, productivity, need, and appearance), family type (biologically related and stepsibling), and context (work/education), older adolescents were more likely to favor equity and benevolence principles across all three domains of characters compared to younger adolescents. Older adolescents, especially female students, also took into account kinship and contextual factors more often than younger adolescents. Boys tended to favor equity across conditions, and girls' views of fairness showed greater nuance, showing greater variance by relationship and contextual factors. The findings suggest that distributive justice reasoning continues to develop through adolescence, as analytical reasoning becomes more complex and nuanced with age and also gender. Productivity and special handicapping needs were prominent bases for making decisions about the allocation of resources, being used to determine worthiness, particularly when negative stereotypical labels were in play, notably when family status was that of a "stepchild." Participants were 160 girls and 160 boys in the 9th grade and the same number of boys and girls in the 12th grade. They were recruited from two public schools and one parochial school serving a small northeastern U.S. city. Vignettes described a group of four brothers in a family that received a windfall financial award. Students were asked to allocate proportions of the award in accordance with their perceptions of fairness based in varying descriptions of the characters in the vignettes. 5 tables and 38 references