Belgian IT professional uncertain about ethical boundaries
The Belgian IT professional does not have a clear view on ethical matters. There are large differences of opinion about what is, and what is not, ethically sound behaviour. These findings appear in a new study conducted by Prof. Dirk Deschoolmeester and researcher Joachim Van den Bergh of Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School. The researchers would like to use this study to initiate further professionalisation of the computer science profession.
The study focuses on IT professionals in the ICT sector and in companies that make use of IT. Via a number of channels (including IT Professional), they were asked to fill in an anonymous online questionnaire.
The questionnaire contained nine ‘ethical dilemmas’: short descriptions of situations that the respondents had to pass moral judgment on. A total of 276 persons filled in the questionnaire at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, which yielded 200 useful responses. The respondents had to evaluate each situation on a 5-point scale, ranging from totally ethical to so unethical that serious measures would be imperative.
The dilemmas were drawn from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and have all been used in previous studies, making comparisons possible. The drawback to using these dilemmas is that they are already several years old. Thus, there were no questions about Facebook in the workplace, for example; but rather about traditional IT situations like bugs in software and illegal access.
All of the dilemmas on the questionnaire contain violations of the ACM’s behaviour code. But the Belgian respondents evaluate these violations in very different ways. There is seldom unanimity and, in some cases, the majority of the respondents do not even see an ethical problem.
Download the complete article (in Dutch) here. (pdf, 463 kB)