Efficacy of Ethics Education in Library and Information Science: A Case Study

Background

Ethics investigation, given the multidisciplinary characteristics of LIS, relies on importing techniques and methodology from other disciplines (Carlin, 2003). University students receive ethics training for future professional careers using disciplines related to LIS, such as Business ethics for future management professionals, or Information technology ethics for those responsible for information and communications systems. These two ethics education fields related to LIS both address decision-making regarding ethics and are based on theories that make this possible from a sociological, psychological, or philosophical perspective (O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005, Craft, 2013, Walker, 2013, Mulhearn et al., 2017, Wang, Wang & Wang, 2020), as well as on educational methodologies and evaluating the impact of such education. Among the variables managed, the deontological code is used as a tool for decision-making. However, Lau (2010) suggests that ethical decisions should be made based on a model of moral reasoning. This author hypothesizes that university students with adequate ethics training are better equipped to make decisions, and he proves this hypothesis using vignettes and a quantitative analysis of the results. This author’s work is valuable because it provides a review of the literature investigating how ethics education is affected by the technique used (tests, scenarios, questionnaires, interviews, vignettes, measures such as scales, reasoning stages, lists of values) and the pre-post analysis of all referenced works. On the other hand, Carlson and Burke (1998) demonstrate the flexibility of the ethical behavior of students, who change attitude after starting from a rigid point of view at the beginning of the course. This study is based on a qualitative strategy, namely, a single case study in which they apply content analysis.