Mentors Should Model Ethical Behavior Posted on December 6, 2007 Ask for ethics advice and share it, advises Celia B. Fisher (bio).

The project that I’ve been working on, which was initiated by the Office of Research Integrity and funded through NIADS is we don’t know anything about how psychological science or medical science is mentored in terms of the responsible conduct of research.

So our first step in trying to improve mentoring is to understand it. So we’ve developed a series of instruments to measure whether or not mentors are actually communicating information. And we found that there are a number of ways that a mentor can communicate in a positive sense and in a negative sense.

One is that science is an apprenticeship when you’re training individuals. But sometimes I think that investigators who take for granted some of the ethical procedures that they have to use, typically take care of that themselves and don’t share that information with the investigators. And so one advice I would give to young investigators is to always ask questions and if you’re training someone, to involve them in the IRB process.

Another issue is whether or not you’re modeling ethical behavior. It’s the old adage about parents, do what I say, but not what I do. Well, as you know, your graduate students and post-docs are gonna do what you do and not what you say. So it’s very important to model in that way.

However, the departmental climate is also very important. The type of resources and expectations that the institution has, that the department has, the availability of information about ethics, how, on a website, how many links are there to government websites that can help you with things like the certificate of confidentiality, which a lot of people don’t seem to know about. I think that’s very important to provide that kind of information within the institutional climate itself.

And scientists have been somewhat reluctant to have research ethics courses as part of standard graduate or post doctoral training, typically to get a grant, people will take a couple of hours of a workshop, but it’s really not sufficient with respect to knowing how to deal with the ethical issues that arise in the particular population that individual is being trained to study. So it’s very important to begin to incorporate these things.

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