Use the computer to write a short essay (between one-and-half and two pages per case study) in giving detailed response to these cases.
Case Study Five: The Case of the Falsified Data
Mickey Jordan had developed a collaborative social-impact assessment project involving two colleagues and three students. The six-person team was responsible for collecting field data in a wide geographical area at some distance from their university. Each person was responsible for a specific region. The data were fed, by region, into a computer on a weekly basis and monthly meetings were held so that progress reports could be made by team members. At these meetings,names of individuals who had been interviewed during the preceding period were given as a means of checking off the list of identified community specialists,so that the over all progress of the project could be ascertained.
Information filed in the computer did not contain informants’ names or other identifiers, as a measure for maintaining confidentiality and anonymity of informants. Each member of the team was paid by the funds made available through a contract with a federal agency (the faculty members were able to buy release time from teaching with contract funds).
Jordan had an occasion to be in the region assigned to one of the faculty members, Brian Cash, and happened to find himself talking with one of Cash’s reported informants, Henry Jones. Jordon took the opportunity to ask Jones for clarification of reported data that had puzzled him. Jones appeared confused and asked Jordan why he was asking him “these questions.” Jordan explained that he had been curious about specific details of Cash’s report and thought this would be an opportune time to get further information. Jones said that he had never heard of Brian Cash, much less having ever talked to him, and furthermore he did not even know a research project was being conducted in his community.
Jordan’s Dilemma: Should he accept Jones’s statement as a denial of participation in the project to maintain anonymity? Should he accuse Jones of lying? Should he drop the matter for the moment and later tell Cash about the incident? Perhaps Cash had lied about interviewing Jones? Should be confront Cash with this suspicion? Since it was some distance to the field site from the university, should he [Jordan] now seek out other informants Cash had reported on to determine whether or not they had been interviewed? Or, were there other tactics to be employed?
Case Study Six: Professor Purloins Student’s Work: Her Recourse?
Joelle Smith wrote an elaborate research proposal that was to be submitted to the National Science Foundation(NSF)for her doctoral dissertation research. Her dissertation supervisor signed off on the proposal indicating his support of the project and his willingness to supervise Smith’s work. The project was funded for a two-year period.
Smith went into the field and at regular intervals sent copies of her field notes and other written data, along with preliminary analyses of her field problem,to her dissertation advisor. At the completion of fieldwork, Smith returned to her university for one year to write her dissertation.
During the writing period,she regularly read the journals related to her area of specialization. In one of the journals she read a paper published by her major advisor and was shocked to find statements taken directly from her letters, field notes, and data reports, with no credit given to her in the footnotes or elsewhere.
Angered by this discovery, Smith was nonetheless fearful that a direct confrontation with her advisor would result in him becoming tyrannical about her dissertation and impeding her graduation. At the same time, she realized that other members of her committee might have read the article and expect her to cite it in her dissertation, and further to accuse her of plagiarism because she had used the same [her own] data in her dissertation.
Smith’s Dilemma: Should she confront her advisor directly? Should she go to the department head with her discovery? Should she just keep quiet about the matter and “stew in her own anger” (as one person suggested)? Or,were there other tactics she could use to settle this problem?