Ethics in Gathering Data

As an organization development and/or training and development professional what are your responsibilities when reporting statistical data and providing feedback?

It is your responsibility as the OD professional to be honest, fair, open-minded, and objective when collecting and reporting statistical data. You must maintain personal and professional responsibility and integrity for your work when reporting data and providing feedback. Collecting and reporting data should remain a credible and systematic process and you should always keep in mind the consequences of your findings.

What are the potential implications of your findings to the organizational and employees?

The potential implications of the data gathering process can be vastly wide-spread and infinite. The statistical findings could be bringing encouraging news to an organization and it's employees, or just the opposite. Your positive findings could have a manager or CEO patting you on the back. On the other hand, your negative findings could easily spark anger and finger pointing having a manger or CEO wanting to know how you came of with "that" or which employee "this." The idea is to remain constant, consistent, and credible with your statistical processes and procedures so that regardless of the findings and feedback your work is sound.

What might you do to prevent your research from being flawed?

When conducting this type of research, it is important to remain current and relevant in your analysis and methodologies. You must remain open-minded and objective, and asses the methods, not the individuals. Stay well documented and report all appropriate sources. Also, you must discredit any biases, assumptions, or any other flawed information that could obstruct the validity of your results.

Which of our values and ethics would be important to apply and why?

Sorry for not really answering this one... I agree with Jonathan here. The Ethical Guidelines article on the ASA site has tons of great info for this question. We just need to narrow it down I guess. Decide of some specific values and then support it with the info from the article. Let me know.

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