How does international guidance for statistical practice align with the ASA Ethical Guidelines?

TL;DR

This paper examines how international statistical guidance aligns with the ASA Ethical Guidelines, aiming to identify consistency and inform potential revisions for clearer ethical standards in practice.

Contribution

It applies a novel methodological approach to compare international statistical guidance with ASA ethical standards, highlighting areas of alignment and divergence.

Findings

Identifies key areas of alignment between international guidance and ASA standards.

Highlights discrepancies and inconsistencies in ethical guidance documents.

Provides recommendations for clarifying and harmonizing guidance in the future.

Abstract

Gillikin (2017) defines a 'practice standard' as a document to 'define the way the profession's body of knowledge is ethically translated into day-to-day activities' (Gillikin 2017, p. 1). Such documents fulfill three objectives: they 1) define the profession; 2) communicate uniform standards to stakeholders; and 3) reduce conflicts between personal and professional conduct (Gillikin, 2017 p. 2). However, there are many guidelines - this is due to different purposes that guidance writers may have, as well as to the fact that there are different audiences for the many guidance documents. The existence of diverse statements do not necessarily make it clear that there are commonalities; and while some statements are explicitly aspirational, professionals as well as the public need to know that ethically-trained practitioners follow accepted practice standards. This paper applies the methodological approach described in Tractenberg (2023) and demonstrated in Park and Tractenberg (2023) to study alignment among international guidance for official statistics, and between these guidance documents and the ASA Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice functioning as an ethical practice standard (Tractenberg, 2022-A, 2022-B; after Gillikin 2017). In the spirit of exchanging experiences and lessons learned, we discuss how our findings could inform closer examination, clarification, and, if beneficial, possible revision of guidance in the future.