A Little Goes a Long Way: Adapting an Ethics Training Program to Work for Smaller Universities

The present project modified an existing ethics intervention aimed at graduate students, which had previously been evaluated and determined to be effective. The existing program was modified to shorten it from a 2 full-day training to a 1 full-day training. The effectiveness of the modified training program was evaluated using multiple dependent measures: perceptions of ethical dilemmas, ethical decision making and the using of cognitive strategies for ethical decision making, and reactions to the training. The results of the present study indicated that there were significant differences from pretraining to posttraining on measures of perceptions of ethical problems and markers of the cognitive processes involved in ethical decision making, including a focus on the ethical elements of the problem, and overall decision ethicality. Finally, participants reacted favorably to the program. Implications of these results are discussed.