In this activity, participants will split into small groups, discuss a case study, and then all come together to debrief on discussions. Then this process will repeat for a second case study.
- Participants will practice identifying ethical issues in real or proposed research, talking about ethical issues with colleagues, and thinking about changes in research design to improve ethical balance.
- Participants will get a chance to get to know each other on the first day.
To prepare for this activity you should:
- Read the case studies: Case study 1 (Field experiments on voting) and Case study 2 (Hacked data)
- Read the Gerber et al. article that forms the basis of one of the case studies
- Read the notes about each case study that we have created. These notes are available only to instructors on Slack. Please don’t share them with your participants. We don’t want them to shape the discussion. I’d also recommend printing the notes that we’ve created and bringing a hard copy with you so that you can refer to it during the discussion.
There is no specific guidance about how the groups should be formed; purely randomly should work well for this activity.
Group sizes of about 5 should work well.
These times assume that you have 2 hours 15 minutes. If you have less or more time, you can just inflate or deflate times as needed.
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Form groups of about 5 participants randomly
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45 minutes: read and discuss case study 1 in small groups
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15 minutes: guided discussed of case study 1 by all participants lead by instructor (try to discover and highlight the similarities and differences between groups)
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Form new groups of about 5 participants randomly
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45 minutes: read and discuss case study 2 in small groups
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15 minutes: guided discussed of case study 2 by all participants lead by instructor (try to discover and highlight the similarities and differences between groups)
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5 minutes: Overall wrap up (remind them of the learning objectives and summarize themes that you observed across the two cases)
None