Offered As an Online Webinar to International Audiences
Dean’s Doctoral Data
A Fundraiser for Discovering Deaf Worlds*:
Offered as an online webinar to international audiences:
Justice Reasoning
What Spongebob Squarepants can teach sign language interpreters about ethics.
According to morality research, “justice-reasoning” stands at the apex of the moral developmental hierarchy. Kohlberg posited that morality is a developmental process and proposed six stages of development that a person advances through in regards to beliefs on morality. A cohort of 25 sign language interpreters were administered a standardized instrument based on Kohlberg’s moral development. This presentation reports on this data along a second source of qualitative data for the same 25 interpreters. Results of all these data suggest that the profession’s conceptualization of ethics may be a barrier to advancement toward the apex of moral development, or justice reasoning.
Presented at three different times:
- 20 November 2015, 8pm to 10pm (ET, New York) or Saturday, 21st November at 12pm AEDT (Melbourne or Sydney)
- 21 November 2015, 11am to 1pm (ET, New York) or 4pm GMT (London) or 5pm CET (Paris)
- 21 November 2015, 7pm to 9pm (ET, New York) or Sunday, 22 November at 11am AEDT (Melbourne / Sydney)
To register, please go to:
.2 CEUs offered by our gracious sponsor: Alabama Department of Mental Health
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Robyn K. Dean, CI/CT, Ph.D., has been an interpreter for over 25 years, with particular service experience in medical and mental health settings. She conducts workshops internationally on the topics of ethics, reflective practice, work effectiveness, with particular emphases on healthcare interpreting and professional development. Robyn’s demand control schema has been the topic of numerous presentations, publications, grant projects, and most recently a textbook which is being used in interpreter education programs across the globe. Robyn is currently on the teaching faculty as an assistance professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the department of ASL and Interpreter Education.
Robyn continues her research on ethics, decision-making, and moral development in community interpreting. Her doctoral dissertation examined the ethical discourse and justice reasoning abilities of sign language interpreters. Robyn completed her PhD in Translation and Interpreting at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland in June 2015. Her contributions to interpreter education was recognized in 2008 with the Mary Stotler Award, an award conferred every two years, conjointly, by the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf and the Conference of Interpreter Trainers.
*Discovering Deaf Worlds is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the self-determination of signing Deaf communities through local capacity building in developing countries. More information about the important work of this organization can be found at
More details on the topic:
Since its beginning, the sign language interpreting profession has made moral and justice claims as its reason for being or its raison d’etre. Interpreters claim to make decisions that are referred to as empowering the Deaf person. Further, interpreters claim to be allies, and of recent distinction, is the focus on social justice. However, when comparing some of these claims and the ethical content material of the interpreting profession with those of other service-based professions and the philosophies of justice-reasoning, the sign language interpreting profession falls short.
According to morality research, justice-reasoning stands at the apex of the moral developmental hierarchy. Kohlberg posited that morality is a developmental process and proposed six stages of development that a person advances through in regards to beliefs on morality. Researchers who followed on from Kohlberg further proposed three moral schemas from which an individual makes and justifies decisions: personal interest schema, maintaining norms schema, and post-conventional schema.
For decades, the Center for the Study of Ethical Development has been collecting data on how people from around the world respond to an instrument that measures moral development and the tacit use of these three schemas. This measure, The Defining Issues Test (DIT) uses ethical scenarios in combination with a rating and ranking scheme to measure a respondent¹s justice-reasoning, or the ability to reason beyond micro-morality issues and to advocate for broader cooperation and shareable ideals. The DIT has been validated to indicate differences between age groups/educational levels, shows significance in relation to cognitive capacity measures, and is sensitive enough to detect change following moral education interventions (Bebeau & Thoma, 2003).
The DIT was administered to a cohort of 25 sign language interpreters in the US. This presentation reports on the DIT data revealing a strong preference for maintaining norms. Normative data for different age, educational, and professionals also show that interpreters may lag behind those individuals they work with (doctors, lawyers, etc.). This quantitative data is further triangulated with two separate sources of qualitative data collected on this same cohort. Together, these reveal that interpreters consider maintaining their role as the most effective way to engage in ethical practice. Such a conceptualization of ethical behavior, at least theoretically, would serve as a barrier to advancement toward the apex of moral development.
Educational objectives:
1. Identify the three types of ethics: normative, descriptive, and meta-ethics.
2. Describe the various forms of normative ethical content material in sign language interpreting.
3. Explain the normative messages often found in exemplars in the field.
4. Describe the three tacit moral schemas as defined by scholars in the field of justice-reasoning.
5. Describe the components of post-conventional reasoning and the use of values-based decision making.