Researcher Ethics

1
Researcher Ethics

• BRACE (Building Research in Australasian
  Computing Education)
• First Workshop, Dunedin, 23-26 January 2004

2
To whom do you owe a duty of care?

• Your subjects
• People whose work you use/cite
• People who will use your work

3
Your subjects

• You owe people who you investigate a duty of care
• Much ethics in this area is codified and
  research behaviour is a legal obligation
• institutional ethics committees
• human subjects consent
• Some is duty of care
• informed consent
• dont make them uncomfortable/distressed
• dont mistreat them

4
Informed consent

• When is informed consent not informed?
• Coercion
• Can be gross or subtle
• by power (bullying, withholding grades,
  rewards)
• by enforced ignorance (not telling The Whole
  Truth)
• by social forces

5
Botox parties and 'open houses' offer wrinkle
injections Minneapolis Star Tribune 23 April 2002

• Susan Olson runs one of the biggest Botox
  practices in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. But
  even she was shocked to hear about the latest
  craze in New York and Los Angeles - Botox
  parties, where people gather at friends' homes
  for wine, cheese and anti-wrinkle injections
  It's only been a week since the Food and Drug
  Administration approved the cosmetic use of
  Botox, or botulin toxin, a drug that temporarily
  wipes out wrinkles by temporarily paralyzing
  muscles under the skin But the idea of combining
  Botox treatments and social events seems to be
  gaining steam.

6
Botox parties and 'open houses' offer wrinkle
injections Minneapolis Star Tribune 23 April 2002

• Jeffrey Kahn, a medical ethicist at the
  University of Minnesota, was simply amazed. The
  whole notion of informed consent doesn't quite
  have the same meaning when it's in the context of
  wine and cheese, he said.
• "Wherever there's demand like that, there's
  always somebody who's going to fill it,"
  Zelickson said. "As long as people are
  well-informed and it's performed under a safe
  environment, conceptually I don't have any
  trouble with it." But, he added, "you've got to
  wonder what the motivation of the physician is.
  In that sense, it doesn't meet the smell test."

7
People whose work you use

• You owe people whose work you use a duty of care.
  This means you should
• Practice basic skills
• Dont plagiarise
• Reference appropriately and thoroughly
• Report what they say (not what you think they
  said, or what you think they should have said)

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People whose work you use

• Report what they say
• Make sure you know what they say
• Buck, D. and Stucki, D. Design Early Considered
  Harmful Graduated Exposure to Complexity and
  Structure Based on Levels of Cognitive
  Development. SIGCSE 2000, 75-79.
• We have also observed that Blooms taxonomy of
  cognitive learning is helpful in structuring the
  beginning computer science curriculum. Each level
  of the hierarchy is subsumed by the next level,
  so that higher order functioning requires by
  necessity the lower level skills

9
Excuse me?

• Bloom is not cited. His six classifications are
  adapted from Gronlund, N.E. and Linn, R.L.
  Measurement and Evaluation in Teaching 6th ed.,
  Macmillan, 1990
• Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational
  objectives The classification of educational
  goals Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York
  Toronto Longmans, Green.
• Does this pass the smell test?

10
The Hawthorne Effect

• the stimulation to output or accomplishment that
  results from the mere fact of being under
  observation also such an increase in output or
  accomplishment
• Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
• http//www.m-w.com/
• A common anecdotal understanding
• When undertaking empirical studies on factory
  workers, when the lighting levels were raised,
  productivity increased when the lighting levels
  were lowered to previous levels, productivity
  increased.

11
What was actually reported

• In brief
• A multi-year study (began in 1927)
• Light levels one of circa 35 interventions (and
  worst documented)
• Not all interventions increased productivity
• When productivity did increase it was (in
  general) because workers perceived the particular
  intervention to be of benefit to them if their
  perception was that the intervention was
  manipulative and to Managements advantage,
  there was no (or much less) improvement.
• Roethlisberger,F.J. Dickson,W.J. (1939)
  Management and the Worker (Boston, Mass. Harvard
  University Press).

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People whose will use your work

• You owe people who will use your work a duty of
  care. This means you should practice
• honesty in doing your work (pilot studies,
  avoidance of bias, appropriate techniques,
  adequate analysis)
• honesty in situating your work (responsible
  relationship to theory base, dont ignore theory
  that doesnt suit your thesis, or contradicts
  your ideas)
• honesty in reporting your work (tell the whole
  story, point out where you might be wrong, be
  especially sure to avoid selective mis-quoting of
  others work to make it look as though their
  ideas support yours)