An Examination of Academic Ethical Values of the Academics Working in the Field of Speech and Language Therapy

Nurcan Alpüran Kocabıyık Sena Topçuoğlu
Abstract

Purpose: Ethics is a discipline that explores all behaviors and actions of human beings, while at the same time it questions and judges morality. Professional ethics is seen as a discipline that examines and regulates behaviors in business life. Possessing academic ethics and adhering to ethical standards is very important for science, society, education, and professional life. Literature review revealed no research in Turkey regarding ethics about academicians of speech and language therapy. For this reason, this study aims to investigate the ethical values of academicians of speech and language therapy. Method: This study was designed as a screening model. The scale used in the research, ‘Academic Ethical Values Scale’, was developed by Oğuzhan Sevim in 2014, and its obtained validity, reliability and stability coefficients were 0.864, 0.849 and 0.8132 respectively. It measures academic ethical values and is divided into subcategories as ‘scientific ethical values’, ‘ethical values for co-workers’, ‘ethical values for the society’ and ‘ethical values for institutions’ and ‘values for the teaching process and colleagues’. Values in each category are categorized and evaluated as ‘low sensitivity’, ‘undecided-medium sensitivity’, ‘high sensitivity’ and evaluation has been made according to these ranges. 24 academicians participated in the study. The assessment tool was delivered to academics working in the field of speech and language therapy as a Google survey. The obtained data were collected in the common pool. The responses were

evaluated independently by a blind analyzer using SPS 20.0. Results: The results revealed that the ethical values of academicians working in the field of speech and language therapy in Turkey were found to be in the range of high sensitivity (171-250, 87.5%). All values for the sub-categories were also found to be in the high sensitivity range: 91.70% for the education process and colleagues, 54.2% for the community, 75.5% for co-workers, 58.3% for institutional values and 88.0 % for scientific research values. Among the sub-categories, the highest value of sensitivity was obtained for ‘ethical values for the teaching process’. The results also revealed a positive, weak and insignificant relationship between duration of work experience and academical ethics. Conclusion: Academicians working in the field of speech and language therapy appear to have high sensitivity on academic ethical values. When the sub-dimensions of the scale were examined, it was revealed that the values for the teaching process, ethical values for the society, ethical values for the co-workers, values for the institution studied, values for scientific research were highly sensitive.


Keywords

academic ethical values, scientific ethics, social ethics, professional ethics, speech and language therapyacademic ethical values, scientific ethics, social ethics, professional ethics, speech and language therapy


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