The Ethics of Intervening in the Social Lives of Older People

This week I am giving a presentation about a small project that was funded by the University of Melbourne's Office for Research Ethics and Integrity. The project investigated the ethical issues that aged care professionals encounter when designing, implementing, and evaluating social programs for older people. We found that ethical issues are rarely reported in the literature on social isolation interventions, but aged care professionals do encounter ethical concerns, such as how to ensure programs are designed and run in a way that is respectful of participants’ individuality. The findings suggest that there is a need to further investigate these issues in order to inform future ethical designs of interventions and social technologies for isolated older people.

The work will be presented at "Beyond Compliance: Ethics and Integrity Research Showcase" on Tuesday 30th September. 

Update: 
A report about the showcase event is available on the OREI blog.