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What you will do...

22 July, 2019 - 10:09
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/05c97be4-3ad0-47f2-b5a7-a75d0ad90ab7@3.72

Choosing Your Case

  • Tie your case to areas that interest you and tie directly to your research.
  • Chose narratives that raise an ethical issue such as how to mitigate or prevent harm, how to resolve value conflicts, how to balance and respect different stakeholder rights, how to balance out conflicting elements of a socio-technical system, and how to transform a dysfunctional organization into an ethical organization.
  • Choose a case that can be built out of readily accessible information. Looking carefully at the case's socio-technical system can help you identify and assess information needs.
  • Your case should interest and engage you. You and your group should find preparing it a good investment of your time, energy, and expertise.

Structuring Your Case

  • Abstract: Begin your case with a short paragraph that summarizes or outlines the narrative events. It should draw the reader in.
  • Historical Narrative: Here, in about 5 to 10 pages, you should detail the "story" of your case. Elements in a narrative or story include a beginning, middle, and end. Protagonists or main characters confront difficulties or obstacles. (This is called the agon in Greek.) At the end of your case, the reader should be clear about how successful the protagonist dealt with the agon and the antagonists.
  • Socio-Technical Analysis The case narrative unfolds in a particular context called a socio-technical system. Identify the components of your case's STS. Generally these include hardware, software, physical surroundings, stakeholders, procedures, laws, and information systems. Summarize your STS in a table. Then unpack it in a detailed analysis. Frequently, you will find the conflict in your case's narrative in the form of conflicts between values embedded in the STS.
  • Participant Perspectives: If you were detailing the Enron case, you would identify a key decision point and then weave a mini-narrative around it. For example, an important moment occurred when Enron decided to implement mark-to-market accounting. Invent a dialogue where this was discussed and reenact the reasons the eventually led to the decision.
  • Ethical Perspective Pieces: The cases prepared by graduate students in APPE's seminar in research ethics were followed by commentaries by the authors and the ethicists who directed the seminar. They explore ethical issues in the context of the case's narrative in issues such as privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. These ethical perspective pieces can be drawn out into a full blow analysis that follows a framework such as (1) problem specification, (2) solution generation, (3) solution testing, and (4) solution implementation.
  • Chronology: A table outline in chronological order the key events of the case helps you and your reader stay on track.

Analyzing Your Case

  1. Do a Socio-Technical Analysis: Use the examples found at m14025 to get you started. The STS will help you identify key problems.
  2. Specify Your Problem: Look for conflicts between the values embedded in the STS. Look also for harmful consequences in the present, the short term future, and the long term future.
  3. Generate a Solution List. Refine that Solution List: Work on changing and rebalancing elements in the STS to resolve the conflict or harmful consequences you scoped when specifying the problem.
  4. Test Your Solutions: Use the Ethics Tests (reversibility, harms/benefits, and publicity) plus code and values tests to test your solution. Rank them.
  5. Implement Your Solution: Using the feasibility test as a check list, identify possible resource, interest, and technical constraints that could impede the implementation of your solution.

Presentation on Problem Solving

Please view or download it at Decision Making Manual V3.ppt

Clicking on this media file will open a PowerPoint presentation on problem solving in ethics. It outlines specifying the problem, generation solutions, testing solutions, and implementing solutions. This problem solving method is based on an analogy between ethics and design.

Advice for Preparing a Poster on Your Case

  • Your Objective: Develop a Poster that captures the case's narratives and summarizes the different stages of a case analysis framework. In the figure below, we have appended an excellent poster presentation developed by Dr. Carlos Rios.
  • Dimensions: Your poster should print out onto a piece of paper two feet by three feet. It should be available digitally in ppt format (either version 2003 or 2007).
  • Due Date: May 1 for presentation in class either May 1 or May 8.
  • Content: (1) summary of key ethically relevant facts; (2) highlight of the dominant elements of the case's socio-technical system; (3) an analysis of the case that includes problem definition, solutions generated, solution testing (in the form of a solution evaluation matrix), and a plan for implementing the solution over situational constraints; (4) Your names; (5) items that will help visually portray case elements such as flow charts and pictures.
  • Make your case visually interesting and choose images that capture the essence of the concepts you are portraying. Be daring and exciting here.
  • Practice presenting from your poster. And have fun!

Poster Presentation for GERESE NSF Project

Please view or download it at etica poster 2.pptx

Clicking on this figure will give you the poster presentation prepared by Dr. Carlos Rios for GERESE, an NSF project in research ethics for graduate students.

Poster Presentation: Poehlman Case

Please view or download it at Poelhlman Poster.pptx

Clicking on this media file will open a poster presentation reporting on a case of scientific misconduct.

The Poehlman Case analysis/poster is about half way completed. It has been included to give you an idea of how the case development process looks (and feels) at its mid point. The STS table included provides a sense of the gaps that need to be filled with further investigation and analysis. For example, more information could be collected on hormonal treatment therapy. The dialogue box quoting from one of the witnesses could be expanded into conversations between Poelman and the witness or between the witness and officials at the University of Vermont. The point is to identify gaps in the case development that can be filled with moral imagination and further research.

Table 6.7 Style-and Content-Based Criticisms of Poehlman Poster

Content

Style

Information gaps such as details on hormone replacement therapy

Change "background" of poster; interferes with the title

Provide more depth such as personalities of participants

Do not use the same "background" for the Ethical Problem section or eliminate this part to create more space for other parts

Case needs "thickness" or more concrete detail

Difcult to read diferent sections (Too crowded)

Describe motivations of main participants, especially Poehlman

Better arrangement of pictures on poster space needed

More information such as the amount of money awarded to Poehlman in his grants

Eliminate shadows throughout poster

More information needed on ORI investigative procedures

Poster should have "depth" in the form of embedded links that open up background information

References to Wikipedia, the ORI publicity release, and Pascal presentation need to be in larger font

Empty space in Poster could be better utilized