Adapting Ethical Sensitivity as a Construct to Study Technology Design Teams

Abstract

The design of new technologies is a cooperative task (between designers on teams, and between designers and users) with ethical import. Studying technology development teams' engagement with the ethical aspects of their work is important, but engagement with ethical issues is an unobservable construct without agreement on what observable factors comprise it. Ethical sensitivity (ES), a construct studied in medicine, accounting, and other professions, offers a framework of observable factors by operationalizing ethical engagement in workplaces into component parts. However, ES has primarily been studied as a property of individuals rather than groups and in professions outside of computing. This paper uses a corpus of 108 ES studies from 1985-2020 to adapt the framework for studies of technology design teams. From the ES corpus, we build an umbrella framework that conceptualizes ES as comprising the moment of noticing an ethical problem (recognition), the process of building understanding of the situation (particularization), and the decision about what to do (judgment). This framework makes theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of how ethics are operationalized on design teams. We find that ethical sensitivity provides useful language for studies of collaboration and communication around ethics; suggests opportunities for, and evaluations of, ethical interventions for design workplaces; and connects team members' backgrounds, educational experiences, work practices, and organizational factors to design decisions. Simultaneously, existing research in HCI and CSCW addresses the limited range of research methods currently employed in the ES literature, adding rich, contextualized data about situated and embodied ethical practice to the theory.