IT professionals' experience of ethics and its implications for IT education: Confirmation of candidature

Ian D Stoodley

The rapidly changing information technology environment presents IT professionals with significant ethical challenges. The aim of this research is to contribute to our understanding of how to best equip professionals to practice ethics in such a milieu. The research will supplement existing studies, which are predominantly quantitative, focussed on students and theory-based, by investigating in detail practicing IT professionals' lived experience using the phenomenographic approach. Phenomenography seeks to elicit variation in the experience of a group of people and present an interpretation of that experience in a way that makes their experience accessible both to them and others. Rather than focussing on the person or on the object of their experience, phenomenography concentrates on the relationship between the person and the object. The result is a model of that experience from the participants' point of view. During this project IT professionals will be interviewed who are representative of a breadth of experience, age, gender, race, educational background and IT subdiscipline. The analysis of these interviews will represent the variety of experiences described by the participants as a group in terms of their distinctive meanings and limits, and their relationships with each other. The professional experience will be compared with the IT ethics literature to discern how each informs the other. The educational Variation Theory will be employed to help identify educationally significant aspects of this study, for application in IT professionals' continuing education. It is anticipated that the outcome will be insights useful for all levels of IT ethical formation.

IT professionals' experience of ethics and its implications for IT education: Confirmation of candidature

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