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Empowering Graduate Students to Address Ethics in Research Environments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

ELISABETH HILDT ,
KELLY LAAS ,
CHRISTINE MILLER ,
STEPHANIE TAYLOR  and
ERIC M. BREY
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Abstract:

In this article, we present an educational intervention that embeds ethics education within research laboratories. This structure is designed to assist students in addressing ethical challenges in a more informed way, and to improve the overall ethical culture of research environments. The project seeks (a) to identify factors that students and researchers consider relevant to ethical conduct in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and (b) to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific, ethics-based guidelines. An important assumption behind this approach is that direct involvement in the process of developing laboratory specific ethical guidelines will positively influence researchers’ understanding of ethical research and practice issues, their handling of these issues, and the promotion of an ethical culture in the respective laboratory. The active involvement may increase the sense of ownership and integration of further discussion on these important topics. Based on the project experiences, the project team seeks to develop a module involving the bottom-up building of codes-of-ethics-based guidelines that can be used by a broad range of institutions and that will be distributed widely.

Keywords

ethicsresearch ethicsresponsible conduct of researchRCRethics educationgraduate students
Type
Departments and Columns
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 542 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

The aim of this section is to expand and accelerate advances in methods of teaching bioethics.

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, Award Number #1635661.

References

Notes

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