Teaching Ethics

Volume 23, Issue 2, Fall 2023

Checking the Box
Reflections on Research Ethics Education, Compliance, and the Promise of Harmonization

The context of compliance creates special challenges for research ethics education. It can serve as a positive force in promoting research integrity because it forces academic institutions to provide research ethics training, and it forces some people to complete research ethics training. However, when compliance mandates create patchwork coverage with inconsistent requirements, they can have the paradoxical effect of trivializing the very thing they intend to promote. After providing a background on research ethics education mandates from US federal funding agencies, I review the way in which academic institutions tend to respond to these mandates and I explore the impact of these compliance requirements on the goals of research ethics education. Finally, I consider recent calls to harmonize federal agency requirements, and close by sharing the way in which we are trying to harmonize the requirements at my own institution.