Course Scientific Integrity
During your career as a researcher you have to make choices that may affect the norms of science and society.
Coordinator
Dr. Henk Tromp (email: tromph@fsw.leidenuniv.nl)
Content
Social and behavioural scientists are involved in a worldwide quest for the advancement of our understanding of human nature and societies. The aim of their research is to produce knowledge that is objective and unambiguous. However, this lofty aim may be become tainted as it inevitably involves human beings with their conflicting values and interests.
As a scientific researcher you will therefore face dilemma’s of a professional, social and ethical nature.
- Professional: involving research methodologies, the treatment of data, the testing of hypotheses and the like.
- Social: involving human beings as subjects of inquiry, as sponsors of research or as objects of social policies.
- Ethical: raising difficult questions involving idealistic and materialistic interests.
To make things complicated professional, social and ethical dilemma’s tend to merge. During your career as a researcher you have to make choices that may affect the norms of science and society. Your choices may have consequences for your standing as an objective scholar, but also for your career, family, colleagues and society at large.
Some of the issues that will be studied through case studies are informed consent, or the role of honesty and deception; partiality, or the researcher as bringer of unwelcome news; codes of conduct in the social sciences; data protection and data sharing.
Aims
- To raise awareness of the values involved in scientific research,
- to gauge the arguments used to justify a particular course of action,
- to reflect on the consequences of decisions taken by you or others.
This is a pilot course and at the end you will be invited to comment on it. Your comments will be appreciated.
Method of instruction
Lectures, case studies and discussion. You will be invited to present a case, if possible, from your PhD project or other research that you have conducted.
Examination
None, you will be asked to present and discuss your personal code of conduct. If you have successfully completed all assignments, you will receive a certificate signed by the Dean of the faculty, that you have attended the course and written a personal code of conduct.