Studies for Ethical Decision Making
Case Study: Handling Disparate Information
Read Case 7: Handling Disparate Information for Evaluating Trainees located in Appendix A: Case Studies for Ethical Decision Making, in your textbook. Thoroughly answer each of the questions below regarding Case 7: Handling Disparate Information for Evaluating Trainees in a total of 350-500 words. Use one to two scholarly resources to support your answers. Use in-text citations when appropriate, according to APA formatting.
1. Why is this an ethical dilemma? Which APA Ethical Principles help frame the nature of the dilemma?
2. How are APA Ethical Standards 1.08, 3.04, 3.05, 3.09, 7.04, 7.05, and 7.06 and the Hot Topics “Ethical Supervision of Trainees in Professional Psychology Programs” (Chapter 10) and “Multicultural Ethical Competence” (Chapter 5) relevant to this case? Which other standards might apply?
3. What are Dr. Vaji’s ethical alternatives for resolving this dilemma? Which alternative best reflects the Ethics Code aspirational principles and enforceable standards, legal standards, and obligations to stakeholders? Can you identify the ethical theory (discussed in Chapter 3) guiding your decision?
4. What steps should Dr. Vaji take to implement his decision and monitor its effect?
While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and documentation of sources should be presented using APA formatting guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success enter.
You are not required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite.
Case 7. Handling Disparate Information for Evaluating TraineesRashid Vaji, PhD, a member of the school psychology faculty at a midsize university, serves as a faculty supervisor for students assigned to externships in schools. The department has formalized a supervision and evaluation system for the extern program. Students have weekly individual meetings with the faculty supervisor and biweekly meetings with the on-site supervisor. The on-site supervisor writes a midyear (December) and end of academic year (May) evaluation of each student. The site evaluations are sent to Dr. Vaji, and he provides feedback based on the site and his own supervisory evaluation to each student. The final grade (fail, low pass, pass, high pass) is the responsibility of Dr. Vaji.Dr. Vaji also teaches the spring semester graduate class Health Disparities in Mental Health. One of the course requirements is for students to write weekly thought papers, in which they take the perspective of therapy clients from different ethnic groups in reaction to specific session topics. Leo Watson, a second-year graduate student, is one of Dr. Vaji’s externship supervisees. He is also enrolled in the Health Disparities course. Leo’s thought papers often present ethnic-minority adolescents as prone to violence and unable to grasp the insights offered by school psychologists. In a classroom role-playing exercise, Leo plays an ethnic-minority student client as slumping in his chair, not understanding the psychologist, and giving angry retorts. In written comments on these thought papers and class feedback, Dr. Vaji encourages Leo to incorporate more of the readings on racial/ethnic discrimination and multicultural competence into his papers and to provide more complex perspectives on clients.One day during his office hours, three students from the class come to Dr. Vaji’s office to complain about Leo’s behavior outside the classroom. They describe incidents in which Leo uses derogatory ethnic labels to describe his externship clients and brags about “putting one over” on his site supervisors by describing these clients in “glowing” terms just to satisfy his supervisors’ “stupid do-good” attitudes. They also report an incident at a local bar at which Leo was seen harassing an African American waitress, including by using racial slurs.After the students have left his office, Dr. Vaji reviews his midyear evaluation and supervision notes on Leo and the midyear on-site supervisor’s report. In his own evaluation report, Dr. Vaji had written, “Leo often articulates a strong sense of duty to help his ethnic minority students overcome past discrimination but needs additional growth and supervision in applying a multicultural perspective to his clinical work.” The on-site supervisor’s evaluation states thatLeo has a wonderful attitude toward his student clients. . . . Unfortunately, evaluation of his multicultural treatment skills is limited because Leo has had fewer cases to discuss than some of his peers, since a larger than usual number of ethnic minority clients have stopped coming to their sessions with him.It is the middle of the spring semester, and Dr. Vaji still has approximately 6 weeks of supervision left with Leo. The students’ complaints about Leo are consistent with what Dr. Vaji has observed in Leo’s class papers and role-playing exercises. However, these complaints are very different from Leo’s presentation during on-site supervision. If Leo has been intentionally deceiving both supervisors, then he may be more ineffective or harmful as a therapist to his current clients than either supervisor has realized. In addition, purposeful attempts to deceive the supervisors might indicate a personality disorder or lack of integrity that, if left unaddressed, might be harmful to adolescent clients in the future.
Ethical Dilemma
Dr. Vaji would like to meet with Leo to discuss, at a minimum, ways to retain adolescent clients and to improve his multicultural treatment skills. He does not know to what extent his conversation with Leo and final supervisory report should be influenced by the information provided by the other graduate students.
