Standard: The Social Responsibilities of Scientists and Engineers: A Global Survey

科学家和工程师对社会和他们所属的更大的社区所感受到的更广泛的社会责任(即他们关于他们的工作可以和应该为帮助社会和环境做些什么的看法)是科学实践和伦理的一个重要但未被充分研究的方面。关于这种社会责任的性质、范围和来源，科学界和工程界内外都没有达成共识。这项研究项目将对科学家和工程师进行一项国际调查，内容包括：(1)他们对社会和道德责任的信念；(2)他们如何得出这些信念；(3)他们感受到的挑战和机遇影响他们履行社会责任的能力；(4)他们的态度和观点因学科、工作部门、年龄、性别、机构类型和地区等因素的不同而有所不同。调查人员将与海外科学和工程组织合作，接触到来自不同学科、国家和文化的科学家和工程师的全球样本。这项研究直接建立在美国国家科学基金会早期资助的一项研究的基础上，该研究生成了一个强大的、预先测试的调查工具，将其翻译成五种语言，并创建了一个招募具有全球代表性的科学家和工程师样本的流程。该研究项目涉及对世界各地的12,500名科学家和工程师进行定量调查。主要目的是获取具有全球代表性的4000名科学家和工程师的样本，并评估他们对社会和道德责任的意见和态度。这样做将使调查人员能够产生数据和知识，了解来自世界各地的科学家和工程师如何感知他们的社会责任，以及这些责任如何受到国家背景、学科从属关系和其他人口统计特征等因素的影响。该项目将从三个主要方面促进科学和工程伦理的研究。首先，它拓宽了科学和工程伦理的社会研究范围，超越了大学和实验室，考虑了更广泛的社会责任。其次，研究决定和塑造科学家和工程师意见的因素也有助于理解如何鼓励这些社区的成员在工作中更具社会责任感。最后，这项研究将为推动未来的国际科学伦理研究提供重要的新工具(即调查项目和全球抽样方案)。调查结果和数据将在国内和国际上传播。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader social responsibilities that scientists and engineers feel regarding society and the larger communities of which they are members (i.e., their views about what their work can and should do to help society and the environment) are an important but understudied aspect of scientific practice and ethics. There is no consensus inside or outside of the scientific and engineering communities about the nature, scope, and sources of such social responsibilities. This research project will conduct an international survey of scientists and engineers regarding: (1) their beliefs about their social and ethical responsibilities to society; (2) how they arrive at these beliefs; (3) the challenges and opportunities they feel affect their ability to fulfill their social responsibilities; and (4) the ways in which their attitudes and opinions differ by factors such as discipline, job sector, age, gender, institutional type, and region. The investigators will team up with overseas scientific and engineering organizations to reach a global sample of scientists and engineers from a wide variety of disciplines, nations, and cultures. This research builds directly on an earlier NSF funded study that generated a robust, pre-tested survey instrument, translated it into five languages, and created a process for recruiting a globally representative sample of scientists and engineers.This research project involves administering a quantitative survey to 12,500 scientists and engineers around the world. The main aim is to procure a globally representative sample of 4,000 scientists and engineers and to gauge their opinions and attitudes about their social and ethical responsibilities to society. Doing so will enable the investigators to generate data and knowledge about how scientists and engineers from around the world perceive their social responsibilities, and how these are informed by factors such as national background, disciplinary affiliation, and other demographic characteristics. This project will advance research on scientific and engineering ethics in three main ways. First, it broadens the scope of social studies of scientific and engineering ethics beyond the university and laboratory to consider wider kinds of social responsibilities. Second, studying the factors that determine and shape scientists' and engineers' opinions also enables understanding of how to encourage members of these communities to be more socially responsible in their work. Finally, this study will provide important new tools (i.e. survey items, a global sampling protocol) for advancing future international studies of scientific ethics. Findings and data will be disseminated nationally and internationally.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.