Assignment: Ethical Transgressions
Assignment: Ethical Transgressions
Assignment: Ethical Transgressions
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This study examines ethical transgressions of school psychology graduate students using the critical incidents technique. Program directors of school psychology programs listed in the Directory of School Psychology Graduate Programs (Thomas, 1998) were asked to describe ethical violations committed by their students during the past 5 years. Violations dealt primarily with issues involving confidentiality, competence, and professional and academic honesty. Directors believed that the majority of students would not find most ethical issues problematic. Implications for training are discussed.
Key words: ethical violations, graduate students, graduate training
Psychology graduate programs provide ethics education for their students to ensure that these students will behave in an ethical manner to protect the people they serve (Koocher & Keith-Spiegel, 1998). However, knowledge of what is ethical behavior does not ensure that graduate students will always behave ethically. Studies by Bernard and Jara (1986); Betan and Stanton (1997); and Pope, Tabachnick, and Keith-Spiegel (1987) found that some students indicated that they would not report ethical violations of other graduate students. A survey of graduate students from 40 training programs in clinical psychology found that 95% of student respondents knew of peers who were so impaired as to affect their professional functioning, and 49% were aware of unethical behaviors by peers (Meatus & Allen, 1991). Only 42% confronted the impaired peers, and only 28% confronted peers behaving unethically.
More recently, a critical incidents survey of counseling and clinical psychology training directors from 75 American Psychological Association (APA)-accredited programs yielded 89 occurrences of ethical transgressions by their students (Fly, van Bark, Weinman, Kitchener, & Lang, 1997). The highest percentages of violations reported involved confidentiality (25%), professional boundaries (20%), and plagiarism (15%). Fifty-four percent of graduate students committing ethical violations had taken an ethics course.
Thus far, research conducted on graduate student ethical conduct has focused on clinical and counseling psychology students. Because they often assess and treat children and adolescents in school settings, school psychologists might encounter ethical dilemmas that students working with other populations do not (Jacob-Timm & Hartshorne, 1998). This research sought to extend the critical incident technique used by Fly et al. (1997) to the study of ethical transgressions of school psychology graduate students. The critical incidents technique is used in exploratory studies to gather “extreme behaviors in defined situations” (p. 492). This technique was used in developing the original APA ethics code (Canter, Bennett, Jones, & Nagy, 1994) and studying ethical incidents in the supervision of student research (Goodyear, Crego, & Johnson, 1992) and relationships with former clients (Anderson & Kitchener, 1996), as well as to obtain information about ethically challenging circumstances experienced by school psychologists (Jacob-Timm, 1999). Documentation of critical incidents focuses attention on issues that might be addressed in training.
In addition to querying school psychology program directors about ethical transgressions of their graduate students, this study also asked the directors to indicate how problematic 10 ethical behaviors were for their graduate students. This was done to provide further information about ethical behaviors that might warrant special or increased emphasis during graduate training.
METHOD
Participants
Participants were directors of’ school psychology graduate programs listed in the Directory of School Psychology Graduate Programs (Thomas, 1998). Forty percent (n = 85) of a sample of 214 school psychology graduate program directors returned questionnaires. Five program directors returned noncompleted surveys. Of the 80 programs with completed questionnaires, 63% (n = 50) offered an ethics course. Of the 72 programs reporting accreditation status, 18 were accredited by both the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) and the APA, 31 were accredited by NASP only, and 3 were APA accredited only. Of the 78 programs that reported degrees offered, 36 (46%) indicated that the doctorate was the highest degree offered, 27 (35%) stated that the specialist degree was the highest degree offered, and 15 (19%) offered only a master’s degree. Programs averaged 37 students (SD = 21.40) and 3.61 full-time equivalent faculty members (SD = 2.16).
Questionnaire
A three-part school psychology graduate student ethical transgression questionnaire was used in this study. Part 1 requested program description of degrees offered, accreditation, location of program, number of students, and number of full-time equivalent faculty. Like the Fly et al. (1997) questionnaire, Part 2 asked for descriptions of up to three graduate student incidents involving ethical violations or violations of departmental standards within the past 5 years. For each incident, the following information was requested: incident description, how it was brought to the program director’s attention, whether the student had taken an ethics course, and outcome of incident. Part 3 asked program directors to rate how problematic they believe graduate students find the following situations: maintaining client confidentiality, maintaining professional boundaries, accurately representing credentials, obtaining consent for treatment, reporting colleagues’ ethical violations, reporting data accurately, taking appropriate publication credit, providing appropriate citations of others’ work, maintaining test security, and resisting pressure to cheat on exams. Participants were asked to respond to each item on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (not problematic) to 5 (extremely problematic). Items were chosen to reflect standards from the APA (1992) ethical principles (including general standards) that were found to be problematic for graduate students in previous research (Bernard & Jara, 1986; Betan & Stanton, 1997; Fly et al., 1997; Pope et al., 1987).
Procedure
School psychology graduate student ethical transgression questionnaires were sent to directors of school psychology graduate programs listed in the Directory of School Psychology Graduate Programs (Thomas, 1998). Critical incidents from Part 2 of returned questionnaires were typed onto cards and given separately to three school psychology doctoral student judges, who were instructed to classify each incident according to APA ethical standards and assign incidents that did not appear to fit the standards to an “Other” category. Following procedures established by Hill (1993), agreement between two judges was accepted as the final categorization. If all three judges disagreed, the incident was reviewed by two doctoral-level clinical psychologists, who determined the final categorization. The doctoral-level judges reviewed incidents categorized as Other to confirm that the incidents belonged in this category. Also, similar incidents in the Other category were grouped together by these two judges.
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