Call for Case Studies in Ethics

The Ethics Committee of the AAPA is developing educational resources for a new section on the AAPA website to provide information and training tools about ethics in our profession. 

We are calling for real cases of ethical issues to serve as the potential foundation for the development of discipline-specific case studies. If your suggested real case is chosen, the Ethics Committee will work with you to develop it into a case study by following a modified RICE (Reflect, Investigate, Contemplate, Evaluate) guide format (1). 

Process

All are welcome to submit case studies for consideration. A three-person subcommittee will screen the submissions to ensure that no party – either persons submitting case studies or Ethics Committee members – is at any point forced into a position of mandatory reporting. For this reason, we will not accept case studies from individuals with affiliations at institutions that match those of subcommittee members. Those institutions are: Whittier College, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Colorado.

Confidentiality

The Ethics Committee understands that fulfilling this call necessarily entails the sharing of potentially sensitive information. Because we must balance the need for crucial contextual information in these case studies with privacy concerns, any identifying information that you share with the Ethics Committee will be kept confidential, including names of individuals, institutions, or places. The Ethics Committee is committed to working with you to obfuscate readily identifying details during case study development. This ensures that sensitive identifying information (or potentially defamatory information) is not disclosed outside the Ethics Committee via the resulting case studies.

Format

At this point in time, we are interested in an informal sketch of a case study. A short paragraph stating the general topic and describing the scenario you experienced or observed will suffice. 

Potential Topics

All topics will be considered for our website.

Deadline

The deadline for this call is May 31, 2016.

Please send your case studies to: Graciela Cabana, Ethics Committee Co-Chair (gcabana@utk.edu). _____________________________ 

(1) LM Whiteford, RT Trotter II. Ethics for Anthropological Research and Practice. Waveland Press, 2008.