Ethical Standards in Data Science and Psychology

After completing the preliminary reading found in the Discussion Assignment Instructions, choose one of the three professional scenarios described below and answer the following prompts in your original thread:

1 Analysis: State which scenario you chose and explain how the behavior in this scenario violates professional ethics, using specific support from both the ASA and APA ethical guidelines.

2 Action: How would you handle this situation as a professional counselor or psychologist? What approach would you take with your colleague/supervisor? Note that there are no right or wrong answers—this is a personal reflection on how you might handle such a situation in a professional manner.

3 Reflection: The Bible is full of stories of people who had to make difficult decisions or confront someone who was doing wrong. Choose a story that resonates with you and describe how the lesson(s) could apply to your specific scenario.

4 References: Include references in current APA style for the ethical guidelines, the Bible, and any other sources used.

Scenario 1:

You are a counseling supervisor at a local clinic that is taking part in a multi-site study of treatments for severe clinical depression among teenagers. You and your colleague are responsible for conducting assessments, recording data, and reporting the results to the academic team in charge of the study. Your colleague continues to mention that the outcome of the study could determine the level of future support for his preferred method of treatment. One day, you discover that your colleague has been slightly altering the scores in the outcome records in order to make his preferred treatment look superior to the other treatments in the study. When you ask him about it, he says he’s only making “small changes here and there, nothing too serious or too obvious.”

Scenario 2:

You are a school psychologist at a middle school, and part of your job is supervising the spring round of testing and evaluation that helps determine your school’s performance compared to other schools. The principal is excellent at her job and a good friend of yours. After an after-school event one evening, the two of you are chatting on your own when she mentions that she’s worried about the school’s performance ratings for the year. She has seen the preliminary data, and there is a small group of students in seventh grade who have extremely low scores that are pulling the average down for the rest of the group. She says that she plans to drop these very low scores when she sends the score sheets to the state. When you ask her why, she says that “they are not representative of the rest of the students’ abilities so shouldn’t be counted.”

Scenario 3:

You are a member of a team of social workers studying the relationship between social media use and depression among women. The study is funded by both government and industry organizations, including some social media companies. The supervising researcher of your team has been meeting often with representatives from one of these social media companies. When asked, she says that they are just discussing general study guidelines that everyone knows about. However, you later overhear that the company has offered your supervisor stock options and a paid position on an advisory board when the study is concluded, which she has accepted. You ask her to disclose this connection in the author notes of the paper that will soon be published, but she refuses, saying “it’s not a big deal and there’s no point raising a fuss.”