The evaluation of IT ethical scenarios using a multidimensional scale

Abstract

Concerns about the increased use and abuse of information technology have evolved into more formalized evaluations of computer ethics in many organizations. While ethical situations regarding computer usage, privacy, and ownership have been previously researched by focusing on ethics as a holistic construct, recent ethics research has produced an ethics scale which measures not one but three dimensions of ethics: moral equity, relativism, and contractualism. The purpose of this research is to extend previous research in which computer users evaluated ethics using a single item. The authors utilize a multidimensional scale that identifies the ethical rule or principle that was violated. They then compare the unidimensional scale to the multidimensional scale and discuss the tradeoffs involved in adding scale items.