What is an Ethics Coordinator?

By: Matt Brodhead, Ph.D., BCBA-D

What is an ethics coordinator? And why is it important for your Applied Behavior Anlaysis (ABA) company or school to have one? 

What is an ethics coordinator? An ethics coordinator is someone at your place of employment who specializes in ethics. Consider it this way: when you are stuck with a tricky problem behavior that won’t go away, you may go to a person who has the knowledge, skills, and abilities to help assist you. 

Just as you may have a go-to person to help you design a functional analysis and effective function-based treatment plan, an ethics coordinator can help you approach and solve an ethical dilemma, or reduce the likelihood of one happening in the first place! 

You may think of the ethics coordinator as a “resident expert” on ethics, someone you can go to when you need to seek help about an ethics-related issue. An additional benefit of an ethics coordinator is that they can help to design individual and group trainings that are intended to help employees become more knowledgeable about ethics. Again, think about the person at your school or company who is the go-to person on functional analysis or parent training; the ethics coordinator fits a similar role, except with ethics!

Why have an ethics coordinator? Unfortunately, most companies or schools don’t have someone who is designated as the “resident expert” on ethics. And the potential implications of this oversight can be quite costly. 

By having an ethics coordinator, an organization may help to reduce harm to consumers that occurs due to unethical behavior by employees. This is because an ethics coordinator can make sure employees get the training they need to be ethical behavior analysts!

Ethics coordinators can also help guide the organization to make good, sound decisions that reduce the likelihood of getting sued. Though this point is secondary to a behavior analyst’s primary value that client interests always comes first, it is also important to think about how good, solid, ethical behavior helps to keep the school or company up and running.

A final benefit of an ethics coordinator is that they help to promote the brand of ABA in a positive way. By giving employees the tools to behave as ethically as possible, an ethics coordinator helps to further exemplify all of the positive aspects of ABA as a consumer-focused and effective treatment.

Interested in learning more? Purchase A Workbook in Behavioral Systems Analysis and Ethical Behavior and learn how to improve the ethical behavior of your employees.

The above information is based off of recommendations from the peer-reviewed article, Teaching and Maintaining Ethical Behavior in a Professional Organization by Matthew T. Brodhead and Thomas S. Higbee. The peer-reviewed article was published in 2012 in Behavior Analysis in Practice.