Previous justice research has used exchange situations, which involve expectations of reciprocity with no special responsibility for another's welfare, to compare the relative importance of procedural (fairness of rules and processes involved in reaching outcomes) and distributive (fairness of outcomes) fairness. Since differences were found as a function of social context, it was hypothesized that as the social context of an allocation moves from exchange to communal relationships, which involve feeling a special responsibility for another person's needs, the relative importance of procedural fairness will increase. To examine this issue, a simulation procedure involving a communal relationship was used. College students (N=114), high school students (N=120), and junior high school students (N=120), read a scenario in which parents allocated money to their teenage children, and then completed a questionnaire. Procedural and distributive justice were manipulated in a 2 x 3 factorial design; eight dependent measures of social and affective responses were examined. The results revealed that procedural justice accounted for significantly more variance than did distributive justice on all eight dependent variables. These findings differed from previous findings in exchange situations, suggesting that as allocator-recipient relations become closer, or more communal, procedural fairness becomes increasingly more important than distributive fairness. (Author/NB)