Getting It Right with Practical Ethics: How Academia, Government, and Industry Can Implement Standards of Practice for Quantitative Sciences

• Activity Number: 295
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Committee on Professional Ethics
• Author(s): Pandurang M. Kulkarni* and Lisa LaVange* and Rochelle Tractenberg* and Sastry Pantula*
• Companies: Eli Lilly and Company and FDA/CDER and Georgetown University and Oregon State University
• Keywords: Professional Ethics ; Traceability ; Transperacny ; Guidelines

Abstract

Due to the emergence of big data, Statistics as a profession, & more broadly, professionals who specialize in data analysis, are growing exponentially due to the demands from scientists & almost all industries for analysis, interpretation, & decision making using advanced statistics. This places high responsibility on statistics professionals to do the right thing due to the differing pressures from many commercial & scientific career interests. Misuse of statistics have been well known & need to be avoided to keep our profession valuable & growing. Therefore, it is imperative that we educate the professionals on the importance of utilizing some key guiding principles in their professional conduct. The ASA Professional Ethics Committee has developed some guidelines on professional conduct. However, there is greater need for clarity, process, & pragmatism for understanding the guidelines & to implement them in a tailored fashion. Therefore, it is our intent to bring professionals from Academics, Government, & Industry to share their best practices & challenges to the Statistics professionals at large to learn from each other & to adapt ways to follow the guiding principles.