Investigating the Relationship Between Ethical Awareness and Professional Accountability Among Nurses

Posted: Jan 07, 2018

• Dexter Ross
• Ember Jackson
• Noah Walsh

Abstract

This research presents a novel computational framework for analyzing the complex relationship between ethical awareness and professional accountability in nursing practice. Unlike traditional qualitative approaches in healthcare ethics research, we developed a hybrid methodology combining natural language processing, network analysis, and machine learning to quantitatively assess ethical decision-making patterns. Our approach introduces the Ethical Accountability Index (EAI), a computational metric derived from analyzing nursing documentation, incident reports, and professional communications. We collected and processed data from 1,247 nursing professionals across three healthcare institutions over an 18-month period. The methodology employed transformer-based language models to extract ethical reasoning patterns and graph neural networks to model accountability relationships. Our findings reveal a non-linear relationship between ethical awareness and accountability, with distinct threshold effects where increased ethical awareness beyond certain levels paradoxically correlates with decreased accountability in specific clinical contexts. The research demonstrates that computational approaches can uncover previously unrecognized patterns in healthcare ethics, providing new insights for nursing education and professional development. This interdisciplinary work bridges computer science and healthcare ethics, offering a replicable framework for quantitative ethical analysis in professional contexts.