Case discussions have been a staple of higher education for a long time, especially in business schools (e.g., Barnes et al., 1994). I’ve written elsewhere about making case examples and discussion more effective by such techniques as varying the facts of the case (e.g., Costanzo & Handelsman, 1998) and adopting the perspectives of different people in the case (Anderson & Handelsman, 2010; Handelsman, 2011). Today, I want to explore the time frame in the case example itself. Like most of what I do, I want to go backwards—from after-the-fact to before-the-fact—and look at four ways to design and discuss cases.

After the Fact: Judgments of Ethical or Unethical Behavior

Many ethics cases are complete stories about what a professional does in a given situation. Students then determine if the behavior was ethical or not. For example, they could consider the case of a professor who assigns grades based on hair style rather than test performance. These discussions are great for having students learn how to apply codes of ethics, principles, laws, or other specific guides. Sometimes students even role-play an ethics committee or licensing board.


After the Decision: Implementation  

Gentile (2012) notes that when people (she concentrates on business leaders) don’t act ethically it is often not because they don’t know the right course of action. Rather, they have difficulty putting their awareness into action. Her approach is called Giving Voice to Values (GVV). She writes, “GVV starts from a presumed ‘right answer’ to certain ubiquitous values conflicts and invites students to craft scripts and action plans for implementing this ‘answer’ that have the best chance of being persuasive and successful” (p. 190). For example, we might agree that we need to confront a colleague who is acting unethically (see APA Standards 1.04 and 1.05), but we may be hesitant to do so because of feelings of loyalty (Betan & Stanton, 1999), wanting to avoid the loss of friendship (Rogerson et al., 2011), and other reasons. We need to develop an effective plan.
GVV is a great way to bridge the gaps between ethical awareness, analysis, and implementation. But students often need practice at analysis and coming to know what good alternatives are. That’s were our next type of case comes in:


In the Moment: Ethical Analysis and Decision Making

Some of my best case discussions come when I ask students to put themselves into the place of the psychologist who is facing an imminent decision. For example, I might have students read this case (adapted from Handelsman & Woody, 2015):

I ask students to put themselves into Dr. Hawkins’s place and answer these initial questions: “What does it feel like? What would you want to do, just as a human being?” This methods allows students to explore their choices in terms of their own moral sense, “nonrational factors” that might bias their analysis (Rogerson et al., 2011), codes, laws, and values (Tien et al., 2012).

Before the Fact: Designing Policies

We can prevent some ethical problems by doing some thinking in advance, when our feelings and other nonrational factors are at a minimum. Students often say something like, “Every case is different.” But I argue that there are similarities as well, and we can discuss issues or types of cases we can anticipate. For example, our book (Anderson & Handelsman, 2010) has an appendix with 23 areas about which psychotherapists can develop ethical stances, including issues of dress, advertising, accepting (and giving) gifts, and termination.
Termination. What a great word on which to end…