Past research on the ethical decision making of nurses has used Kohlberg's model of moral reasoning, which does not adequately ad-dress issues of caring. The present study builds on the work of Gilligan, Brown, and colleagues to describe issues of moral concern, including justice, care, and integrated concerns. Nurses in the present study articulated justice concerns for fairness, patients' rights, and autonomy. They also stated care concerns for a patient's needs, pain, emotional support, and relationship. Beyond these, nurses expressed concerns that integrated a principled approach (justice) to caring for patients (care) in dealing with issues of deceit and trust, advocacy, and patient dignity in dying. Whereas many earlier studies reported low moral reasoning scores for nurses, the present analysis shows nurses involved in complex and sophisticated ethical considerations and decisions. The analysis also reveals professional constraints on those ethical decisions.
In this article we explore ethical issues arising in a study of home Internet use by low-income families. We consider questions of our responsibility as educational researchers and discuss the ethical implications of some unanticipated consequences of our study. We illustrate ways in which the principles of research ethics for use of human subjects can be ambiguous and possibly inadequate for anticipating potential harm in educational research. In this exploratory research of personal communication technologies, participants experienced changes that were personal and relational. These unanticipated changes in their way of being complicated our research relationships, testing the boundaries of our committment to the principle of trustworthiness and forcing us to reevaluate our responsibilities.
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