Standard: The Social Responsibilities of Scientists and Engineers: A Global Survey

American Association For The Advancement Of Science, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The broader social responsibilities that scientists and engineers feel regarding society and the larger communities of which they are members (i.e., their views about what their work can and should do to help society and the environment) are an important but understudied aspect of scientific practice and ethics. There is no consensus inside or outside of the scientific and engineering communities about the nature, scope, and sources of such social responsibilities. This research project will conduct an international survey of scientists and engineers regarding: (1) their beliefs about their social and ethical responsibilities to society; (2) how they arrive at these beliefs; (3) the challenges and opportunities they feel affect their ability to fulfill their social responsibilities; and (4) the ways in which their attitudes and opinions differ by factors such as discipline, job sector, age, gender, institutional type, and region. The investigators will team up with overseas scientific and engineering organizations to reach a global sample of scientists and engineers from a wide variety of disciplines, nations, and cultures. This research builds directly on an earlier NSF funded study that generated a robust, pre-tested survey instrument, translated it into five languages, and created a process for recruiting a globally representative sample of scientists and engineers. This research project involves administering a quantitative survey to 12,500 scientists and engineers around the world. The main aim is to procure a globally representative sample of 4,000 scientists and engineers and to gauge their opinions and attitudes about their social and ethical responsibilities to society. Doing so will enable the investigators to generate data and knowledge about how scientists and engineers from around the world perceive their social responsibilities, and how these are informed by factors such as national background, disciplinary affiliation, and other demographic characteristics. This project will advance research on scientific and engineering ethics in three main ways. First, it broadens the scope of social studies of scientific and engineering ethics beyond the university and laboratory to consider wider kinds of social responsibilities. Second, studying the factors that determine and shape scientists' and engineers' opinions also enables understanding of how to encourage members of these communities to be more socially responsible in their work. Finally, this study will provide important new tools (i.e. survey items, a global sampling protocol) for advancing future international studies of scientific ethics. Findings and data will be disseminated nationally and internationally. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.