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The study of undocumented students in the United States is critical and growing. As scholars increasingly employ qualitative methodologies and methods in studying undocumented students, it is important to consider the specific challenges, nuances, and benefits of doing so. Undocumented students have a right to a public elementary and secondary education regardless of immigration status, per the 1982 court case Plyler v. Doe. While the stress that undocumented students face during their K-12 years are real and consequential, this stress becomes particularly acute in their postsecondary lives when education is neither guaranteed nor readily accessible. Qualitative research gives insight into the complex obstacles undocumented students face and advocates for the institutional and social change necessary to best support them. Existing qualitative research on undocumented students employs various methodologies and methods including but not limited to narrative inquiry, testimonio, phenomenology, case studies, ethnography, discourse analysis, and grounded theory. Among the salient issues that scholars must take into account when engaging in such research are the ethical, logistical, and relational problems that arise when working with undocumented people; the politicization of researching undocumented students; and the power and privilege that researchers possess in the researcher–participant relationship. Within every stage of the research process, researchers need to take special care when working with undocumented students to ensure their anonymity, respect their lived experiences, and advocate for their human rights. Undocumented research participants are in need of extra protection due to their undocumented status, and this need should not be conflated with weakness. Often, undocumented participants are framed as illegal, powerless, vulnerable, fearful, and in the shadows. While it is true that undocumented people face intense, life-altering, and consequential struggles relative to their undocumented status, it is also true that their intelligence, resilience, and persistence are equally intense. Researchers have an obligation to bring undocumented students’ authentic experiences to the fore in ways that acknowledge their undocumented status and the related struggles while affirming their agency and resistance. How they employ methodological practices is central to this goal.

Malpractice claims against social workers are a reality. Although social workers are trained as students in the importance of adhering to the NASW Code of Ethics, the results of ethics and other practice violations are increasing liability and risk. Social workers have a strong commitment to clients, to communities, and to social justice, but attention to ways of reducing risk, including malpractice insurance and ethics audits, is critical to reducing the numbers of malpractice and ethics complaints against social workers and, ultimately, to enhancing the profession.

How has ethics been connected with the science and profession of psychology? Has ethics been essential to psychology? Or have psychologists increasingly developed objective psychological understandings free of ethical biases? Is ethics in psychology limited to research ethics and professional ethics? Understanding the various connections among ethics and psychology requires conceptual clarity about the many meanings of ethics and related terms (such as moral, ideal, and flourishing). Ethics has included, but goes beyond, research and professional ethics, since ideas about what is good or bad, right or wrong, obligatory or virtuous have shaped psychological inquiry. In moral psychology, psychologists have sought to understand the psychology of ethical dimensions of persons, such as prejudice or altruism. Some psychologists have worked to minimize ethical issues in psychology in general, but others embraced psychologies tied to ethical visions, like advancing social justice. Many ethical issues (beyond professional ethics) have also been entangled in professional practice, including understanding the problems (“not good” states of affairs) for which clients seek help and the (“good”) goals toward which psychologists helped people move. Cutting across the various ways ethics and psychology have been interconnected is an enduring tension: Although psychologists have claimed expertise in the science of psychology and in the provision of psychological services, they have had no disciplinary expertise that equips them to determine what is good, right, obligatory, and virtuous despite the fact that ethical issues have often been deeply intertwined with psychology.

This study addresses a common concept, ethical school culture, in 30 countries. It presents and outlines its dimensions, based on an analysis of their codes of ethics for teachers. The findings generated a multi-dimensional model of ethical school culture that included six dimensions: caring for the pupils, teachers' profession, teachers' collegial relationships, parental involvement, community involvement, and respecting rules and regulations. The study indicated that “ethical school culture” generates from the interaction between the formal ethical aspects, such as educational policy that encourages high standards, and informal ethical aspects, such as ethical norms that perceive teachers’ role modeling as important for maintenance of the profession’s status. In addition, the findings elicited that schools with an ethical culture are not closed educational systems but rather open educational systems that ensure that knowledge will flow from the school to the community and vice versa. This flow of knowledge is in accordance with the ethical goals that advance equity and opportunity for all pupils. Moreover, the similarity that exists between the dimensions in this study and the dimensions in the corporate ethical virtues (CEV) model expand conceptual validity to the generated multidimensional model. In general, this study reveals that schools have an ethical culture characterized by a teachers’ active approach toward promoting their pupils’ ongoing learning and well-being, initiating collaborative learning with colleagues, and promoting parental involvement. This study generated the common meaning of ethical culture in schools, based on teachers’ interactions with colleagues, pupils, parents, community, and regulations. Understanding the meaning of an ethical culture in schools, can help promote ethical teachers, who will know what is expected from an ethical teacher and help promote an ethical culture in their schools. In addition, the findings of this study support the universal nature of the concept ethical school culture and provide deeper insight into the concept of ethical culture in educational systems. This study hopes to encourage the promotion of teachers’ continuing professional development, which focuses on the proposed six dimensions that can lead to a consistently applied ethical school culture.

Manon Lüttichau (1900–1995), who was born a privileged noblewoman, untraditionally sought education and personal independence. She served as a charity worker for 10 years, then became the first paid social helper in Denmark. She was a pioneer for social workers as important professionals in hospital departments. She became inspired by many tours in Europe and the United States for studies of social work and social work education. ML was initiator of the establishment of the first social school. This happened at a time when economic crises and several social reforms increased the need for a professional social work profession. A group of enthusiastic academics and social workers established a volunteer working committee for foundation of a social school . Here it was discussed whether the school should be independence of religion. The result was an independent curriculum, a schedule, a small faculty, creation of teaching material and organisation of administration and practice placement. Development of social work ethics, holistic perspective, and casework were among the subjects in the professional education. ML became later the initiator of the Association for Educated Social Workers in Denmark and she was also serving in Burma for the UN as a social welfare advisor. Similarities and differences between the first education, ML’s viewpoints and modern social work education are identified. ML was living independent of class traditions and other people’s presumptions, but not a declared feminist.

This entry regards intervention research as an essential part of social work as a profession and research discipline. A brief history of intervention research reveals that use of intervention research for the betterment of human conditions is contemporary with the genesis of modern social science. Advances in intervention research are attributed to the comprehensive social programs launched during the 1960s in the United States. A contemporary and generic model of intervention research is described. It is argued that it is ethical to use intervention research and unethical not to use it. Assessment of some of the recent advances in policy making and science gives an optimistic picture of the future of intervention research.

The possibility of practitioner impairment exists in every profession. Stress related to employment, illness or death of family members, marital or relationship problems, financial problems, midlife crises, personal physical or mental illness, legal problems, substance abuse, and professional education can lead to impairment. This article provides an overview of the nature and extent of impairment in social work, practitioners’ coping strategies, responses to impairment, and rehabilitation options and protocols. Particular attention is paid to the problem of sexual misconduct in social workers’ relationships with clients. The author reviews relevant ethical standards and presents a model assessment and action plan for social workers who encounter an impaired colleague.

The foregrounding of gender and, more importantly, the ways in which power produces structures of inequality that shape gendered disaster vulnerabilities have given way to feminist theorizing on disasters. Since the 1990s, feminist works have raised critical questions regarding how conceptualizations of disasters, and the methodologies through which these are studied, have historically privileged androcentric perspectives. Viewing disaster through a feminist lens brings to light other dimensions of living with and responding to risk and disaster that are often elided in gender-blind approaches. For feminist research, theory and practice are not disconnected. Feminist research is explanatory as well as prescriptive, putting emphasis on the need for transformative change especially in unequal gender relations. This perspective is solidified in the ways that feminist approaches foreground the close connections between epistemology, methodology, and methods and the political/ethical orientations they embody. Applied to disaster studies, feminist research highlights the importance of: (a) placing gender and lived experiences at the center of analysis; (b) recognizing how power operates in these contexts; (c) exploring alternative means to represent lived realities through different methods; (d) embodying reflexivity in the research process; and (e) pursuing social, political, and institutional change. Applications of feminist methodologies in disaster studies have led to the development of innovative techniques in constructing alternative accounts of disaster experiences. These include but are not limited to feminist participatory action research, photo-based methods, and alternative mapping techniques. These applications have helped reveal often neglected issues such as gendered violence, women’s lack of representation in decision-making, family dynamics affecting access and control, gendering of state and institutional processes, to name a few, in varying contexts of disaster. In sum, applying a feminist lens offers alternative perspectives on how disasters affect women and other social groups, emphasizing the importance of equitable, inclusive, and ethical research practices. By challenging existing knowledge frameworks and highlighting the relational and intersectional dimensions of disaster experiences, feminist methodologies contribute to a deeper understanding of lived experiences of disasters and the ways in which these are gendered while communicating perspectives of change.

One does not need to look extensively to find examples of organizations behaving unethically in today’s society. With the passage of whistleblower laws and the increased attention to ethical behavior in recent years, many businesses focus on training in order to reduce unwanted behavior. Despite organizations transitioning to more engaging, substantial ethical training programs for their employees, unethical behavior still remains. Moral disengagement, in part, could be the reason. Moral disengagement is when an individual deliberately deactivates their moral self-regulations, allowing the individual to commit unethical acts without shame or guilt. Moral disengagement has eight mechanisms: moral justification, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, distortion of the consequences, dehumanization, and attribution of blame. Each of these mechanisms offers insight into why and how moral disengagement operates within individuals. Because an individual’s reasoning can fall into either a single mechanism or a combination of them, measurement tools commonly place each mechanism as a dimension of moral disengagement. Doing so allows the researcher to examine the construct and its relationships more accurately. The research investigating unethical behavior in organizations is substantial. However, moral disengagement is an antecedent to unethical behavior and not necessarily an unethical act itself. Previous research on moral disengagement often lies within psychology, military science, sociology, and other nonbusiness fields. With the depths of moral disengagement in the workplace still unexplored, scholars have opportunities to contribute research that can help organizations understand moral disengagement, improve ethical training, and potentially curtail employees’ unethical behavior.

It is through the influence process that people generate and manage change. As such, it is important to understand fully the workings of the influence processes that produce compliance with requests for change. Fortunately, a vast body of scientific evidence exists on how, when, and why people comply with influence attempts. From this formidable body of work, one can extract six universal principles of influence that generate compliance in the widest range of circumstances. Reciprocation states that people are more willing to comply with requests (for favors, services, information, concessions, etc.) from those who have provided such things first. Commitment/Consistency states that people are more willing to be moved in a particular direction if they see it as consistent with an existing commitment. Authority states that people are more willing to follow the directions or recommendations of a communicator to whom they attribute relevant expertise. Social Proof states that people are more willing to take a recommended action if they see evidence that many others, especially similar others, are taking it. Scarcity states that people find objects and opportunities more attractive to the degree that they are scarce, rare, or dwindling in availability. Finally, Liking states that people prefer to say yes to those they like, such as those who are similar to them and who have complimented them.

Contemporary issues in biology and Christian theology are still dominated by the legacy of 19th-century biologist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Debates in evolutionary biology in relation to religious belief have been reinforced by historical myths that stress conflict over integration. More conservative branches of Christianity, often allied to particular Protestant traditions, argue for a form of popular theology that attempts to compete with science, namely, creationism. More sophisticated versions of this position may appear under the guise of intelligent design, though creationism and intelligent design are not synonymous. The mirror image of this position has developed among biologists who identify themselves as new atheists, adding further fuel to the fire of an existing controversy. Methodologically speaking, the engagement of biology and theology will depend on different philosophical presuppositions according to basic models of (a) conflict, (b) independence, (c) dialogue, and (d) integration. The biological sciences also have broader relevance to allied subject domains including, for example: (a) ecological, agricultural, animal, and environmental sciences; (b) anthropological, social, and political sciences; (c) medical sciences, including genetic science and embryo development; and (d) new technologies that include bioengineering. Theological engagement with the biological component of each of these domains is particularly intense where there are controversial ethical issues at stake that seem to challenge specific Christian beliefs about human nature or divine purpose. A more positive approach to the biological sciences that draws on research in the constructive systematic theological task, while avoiding historically naïve forms of natural theology, is starting to emerge in the literature. Within Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christian traditions, there is a spectrum of possible positions, such that the field of science and theology as a whole tends to be ecumenical in orientation rather than divided along denominational boundaries. The Catholic and Orthodox churches, however, give greater precedence to official statements by their respective churches that then influence public reception of controversial issues in biology and theology in particular ways.

One could easily argue that the pedagogy of relation is not new: a genealogy of the approach would send us back to the ancient Greek philosophers. However, in recent years relational pedagogy has been taken up in novel and ever-deepening ways. It is a response to ongoing efforts at school reform that center on teacher and administrator accountability, based on a constraining view of education as the effective teaching of content. In this view, methods, curricula, and high-stakes testing overshadow the human relationship between teacher and student that relational pedagogy theorists place at the center of educational exchanges. When relationships are secondary to content, the result can be disinterested or alienated students and teachers who feel powerless to step outside the mandated curriculum of their school district. Contemporary relational theorists offer an alternative vision of pedagogy in a concerning era of teacher accountability. Internationally, teachers experience challenging educational environments that reflect troubled social histories across differences of socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity, gender, and ability status. Climate change, civil and economic instability, and war add global pressures that bring immigrant and refugee students into classrooms around the world. In the United States, histories of slavery, genocide, and indigenous removal continue to resound through all levels of education. Putting the teacher-student relationship at the heart of education offers a way to serve all students, allowing them to flourish in spite of the many challenges we face in the 21st century. Relational pedagogy is inspired by a range of philosophical writings: this article focuses on theorists whose work is informed by the concept of caring, as developed by Nel Noddings, with the critical perspective of Paulo Freire, or the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Although these approaches to ethical educational relations do not necessarily mesh together easily, the tensions among them can bear fruit that informs our pedagogy. After outlining the theoretical contours of relational pedagogy, we will turn to more recent empirical work in the field. New studies help us understand how to turn theory into classroom practices that will benefit all students.

The term “interculturality” acknowledges the complexity of locations, identities, and modes of expression in a global world and the desire to raise awareness, foster intercultural dialogue, and facilitate understanding across and between cultures. Intercultural arts is a critical component of interculturality. One of many global educational imperatives is to further understanding and engage critically in what constitutes intercultural arts. Intercultural arts practitioners and researchers play a significant role in this undertaking. A close examination of intercultural arts work and encounters unravels complex relationships among arts disciplines and ways to conceptualize and understand intercultural arts travels. Intercultural arts research sheds new insights into shared cultural and intercultural futures that need to be reimagined and co-created with a sense of ethical obligations, exploration, openness, and reflexivity. This leads to embracing a multiperspective worldview that addresses and celebrates the embodied nature of intercultural arts practices across global contexts: a worldview that is continually constructed, dynamic, and fluid, existing both within and between locations, and that connotes a particular type of ethical educational space. The study of interculturality in today’s society in general, and in actual intercultural arts practice in particular, is indispensable. For educators who want to engage in researching their professional practice in the “field” of intercultural arts, “field” is a useful agricultural metaphor for the various processes and tools used in researching intercultural arts practice. Social researchers talk, for example, about “entering the field” and “gathering” data as if venturing into the world to harvest material for processing (analysis) before its eventual distribution and consumption by a society hungrily seeking new information to build up its body of knowledge and increase its capacity for growth and improvement. However, for education practitioners researching their own professional practice, and their journey into and focus on “intercultural arts,” it will feel much more fluid and uncertain than being on dry land, and it will require them to locate and address the overlap of practice and ethical agendas in educational research.

Business scandals in the early 2000s gave renewed rise to the question of how companies can be led ethically. Correspondingly, research on ethical leadership focuses on leaders as moral persons—but even more so as moral managers. This focus came with a more general shift within many Western societies toward issues of sustainability, social justice, and well-being, and it has simultaneously given rise to the development of related constructs such as servant, respectful, and authentic leadership. In general, ethical leadership research has contributed to a necessary debate about leaders’ roles and responsibilities. Nonetheless, recent meta-analyses and critical reviews have criticized the minimal to nonexistent incremental value of the current operationalization of ethical leadership beyond other leadership concepts, underscored the philosophically all too simplistic notion of ethics underlying the concept, and highlighted its construct redundancy with the domain of follower-focused leadership. As such, there appear to be fruitful avenues for further honing the construct and its operationalization so that research can meaningfully inform leadership practice.

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) embraces a collaborative partnership approach to research that equitably involves community members, organizational representatives, social workers, other practitioners, and researchers in the research process. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community and has the aim of combining knowledge with action and achieving social change. It is community based in the sense that community members become part of the research team and researchers become engaged in the activities of the community. Community–researcher partnerships allow for a blending and aligning of values and expertise, promoting co-learning and capacity-building among all partners, and integrating and achieving a balance between research and action for the mutual benefit of all partners. Various terms have been used to describe this research, including participatory action research, action research, community-based research, collaborative action research, anti-oppressive research, and feminist research.

Charles Samuel Levy (1919–2006), professor, ethicist, Jewish communal professional, worked at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University in New York, from 1956 to his retirement in 1982. His numerous publications have influenced today's leading social work ethicists.

What does it mean to document the morphology of a language, and how does one go about such a task? Most of the world’s languages are arguably underdocumented, yet morphological generalizations often require large amounts of primary data: thousands of word forms could be needed to establish basic patterns of allomorphy, for example, or the structure of an inflection-class system. Because of this, the major debates in the language documentation literature affect the field of morphology by shaping the nature of the data. A starting point is the idea that traditional methods of elicitation, often via translation from a contact language and inevitably requiring a patient speaker, can mask ingrained assumptions about the ontology of data and the wider context of linguistic research. Critical examination of these assumptions yields a wider range of possible approaches that can be drawn on to produce a corpus theorization (i.e., a rationale for the types of communicative events to be recorded) appropriate to each language situation. In particular, it has been argued that it is sometimes not ethical to collect language data in a decontextualized way that prioritizes (or appears to prioritize) the linguist’s goals above speakers’ goals, where those are not the same. Thus, in morphology, where virtually everyone agrees that some type of elicitation is essential, creativity and flexibility are sometimes needed to address or modify research questions. Fortunately, documentary linguistics has seen significant advances in the theory and practice of data management, making it possible to work efficiently with data from a wide variety of recording-session structures. Of equal interest are the reasons why a decontextualized approach may be undesirable, even for the linguist’s analytical purposes. The goal of ‘documenting morphology’ is an abstract one; one can only really document word forms, and morphological structure is a product of analysis. From this fact arise a few problems. First, and even independently of the ethical issues referred to above, it is not always obvious what methods are most reliable for getting speakers to produce word forms or for understanding speakers’ knowledge about them. Different methods have complementary pros and cons, so it is usually necessary to use a mix. When working with existing data, an appreciation of the complexities of the data gathering process is useful for developing a critical approach to the background contexts, strengths, and limitations of primary sources. Second, ‘documentation’ implies a reasonable level of comprehensiveness. For many semantically or functionally defined phenomena, it is possible to make a cross-linguistically robust checklist that ensures that one has more or less covered the relevant territory. It is much less straightforward to compile an inventory of structures in any formal domain, particularly given cross-linguistic variation in morphological vs. syntactic vs. prosodic encoding of similar functional categories. In morphology, the linguist’s inventory of phenomena often keeps expanding until nearly all grammatical constructions and large numbers of lexical items have been encountered. Again, this challenge can be addressed by using a mix of methods and genres to check that one has a correct understanding of at least the most commonly occurring patterns. Spontaneous speech tends to contain constructions that fail to show up in elicitation for reasons like pragmatics or interference from the contact language, while structured elicitation or metalinguistic work is needed to fully investigate the word-formation patterns within each of those constructions, or indeed (if the linguist is nonnative) to get enough of a foothold to work with spontaneous speech at all. Checklists from the viewpoint of morphological typology tend to initially be most useful for monitoring and organizing, and later for filling gaps at a more advanced stage of research.