INVESTIGATING FACULTY MEMBERS NORMATIVE AND ANTI-NORMATIVE BIAS TOWARDS THE ETHICS OF SCIENCE: POST-GRADUATE STUDENTS PERSPECTIVES

Nowadays, the production of science is one of the important tasks and missions of universities. In the view of Robert Merton, ethical behaviors are the essence of science, hence observing them is essentially useful for the realization of the fundamental goals of science. As such, insights from Merton and Midriff’s theory were integrated into the present study which aims at investigating the extent to which faculty members are committed to science norms and anti-norm bias. To this purpose, a questionnaire was administered to 460 postgraduate students of electrical-computer engineering, mechanical engineering and chemistry, from three universities in Tehran, Tarbiat Modares, and Shahid Rajaei. The participants’ responses were analyzed using SPSS program. The instrument validation was done through factor analysis which led into the extraction of three main components which explained 36.02 percent of the total variance. The results show that the instrument enjoys a satisfactory construct. Furthermore, the reliability of the instrument was estimated through Alpha Cronbach’s as 0.79. The results indicate that postgraduate students of engineering believe scientists and researchers are most often bound to the norms of science, but the results relevant to the anti-norms of science are also noticeable. In addition, with reference to the commitment to the norms and anti-norms of science, degrees of inconsistencies in ideas and beliefs were observed among the participants. When comparing the electrical-computer engineering, mechanical engineering and chemistry students, we found the chemistry students reported a lower mean for the faculty’s commitment to the norms of science.