Search results

This study aim to examine the themes of moral disengagement (MD) and engagement in reasoning regarding a putative governmental right to kill innocent civilians when fighting terrorism.

In total, 147 participants from Israel, 101 from the USA and 80 from South Africa provided quantitative rating scale responses and qualitative explanations about such a putative right. Qualitative responses were coded for presence or absence of indices of MD and engagement.

In ANOVAs by gender and country, men scored higher than women on rating scale scores indicating support for the right; there were no significant national differences on these scores. Chi-square analyses with the coded qualitative responses indicated more men than women gave morally disengaged responses, proportionately more South Africans than Israelis provided morally disengaged responses and proportionately more South Africans and Americans than Israelis provided morally engaged responses. Pearson correlation analyses indicated that MD was positively correlated with rating scale scores and moral engagement was negatively related to rating scale scores in all three countries.

Regarding limitations, it is difficult to know how the omission of qualitative explanations of rating scale responses by many participants influenced the statistical findings – or how to interpret the more restricted level of qualitative responses in Israel and South Africa as compared to the USA.

Programs designed to counteract MD have the potential for helping reduce support for war and its inhumanities across diverse nations.

This is the first study on MD to compare American, Israeli and South African perspectives on the justifiability of human rights violations in the war on terror. The findings go beyond earlier studies in finding gender differences in MD that occurred across three very different nations in three very different parts of the world.

Ten years have elapsed since the author was a doctoral student and conducted a study on the life stories of abusive men, about which the author writes in the present autoethnography. The research was submitted and earned the author her PhD; the findings were written in a book published in 2003, and the author also had articles published abroad. And yet, not one word of what the author relates here was reported to her supervisor, nor did it appear in any of the publications dealing with that study. This paper seeks to address these issues.

In this autoethnography the author describes some episodes that occurred while she was conducting this research and raises some questions regarding feminist research and the power relations between a female researcher and male participants – questions such as “Could it have been less abusive?”, “Why did I not write all this as part of my reflection on myself and my research process?”, “Why did it take me so long to be able to talk about it in a professional forum?”, “Does it happen to every researcher who studies men?”, “Can it happen again?” and “Does it lie somewhere in the seductive part of female interviewer‐male participant relationships?”.

In light of the episodes described, the paper will discuss the dilemmas of being a woman and a feminist researcher, vulnerable to some male research participants.

The question of a woman researcher's vulnerability is scarcely described in research methodology articles and books.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perspectives of academic staff on issues of diversity and social schisms: capturing their perceptions of the complex relations at an academic campus positioned in an intricate sociopolitical context. It also explored how the faculty’s construal of diversity and social divisions inform their educational practices.

The study employed a qualitative approach using grounded theory methodology. Data collection was based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 diverse faculty members from different departments in a Northern Israeli college. The interviews were transcribed and processed into main themes and categories.

The findings revealed two main themes: “Diversity awareness” depicting recognition and sensitivity to the complex social context in the college, strategies of directly engaging with it, downplaying or overlooking the intricacies, and “Practices” describing the practical translations of the educational credos into teaching practice. Both themes reflected a myriad of faculty voices.

The study illuminated the challenges posed by social schisms, inequalities, and diversity for the faculty who need to grapple with the intricacies on a daily basis. More open dialogue and debates by the protagonists are needed to increase awareness of diversity and experimenting with different ways of addressing the intricacies.

Empirical evidence of the organizational actors’ predicaments, their diverse patterns of coping with intricacies, and the factors underlying their choices contribute to the body of knowledge on managing diversity in vivo by real women and men with different backgrounds and experiences.