Designing Professional Ethics Questionnaire in Medical Research

Ethics in research is one of the most widely used categories of professional ethics. Research ethics focuses on the objective and partial cases of observing ethics in research and tries to solve the ethical problems of scientific research. The present study intends to survey the rate of observance of research ethics in medical research and design a questionnaire of ethics.

This is a descriptive survey research. The statistical population included all the 20998 faculty members of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education and the statistical sample was 378 people who were selected to participate in the study using the probability method. The data collection tool was a self- constructed questionnaire resulting from thematic qualitative content analysis. The exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used for data analyzing. Cronbach's alpha method was used to evaluate the reliability, and a statistical analysis of the results was done by SPSS and PLS software.

The results of exploratory factor analysis showed seven factors equal to 60.170% of the variance. These factors were confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis by smart PLS software. The reliability of the questionnaire was obtained by Cronbach's alpha method equal to 0.915.

The final version of this 35 items questionnaire is approved by 7 factors (adherence to research ethics, consequences of research ethics, barriers to good behavior in research, institutionalization of ethics, individual principles, policy-making, and organizational ethics), and this valid and reliable tool can be used to measure the level of professional ethics in medical research.