Stimulating responsible conduct of research is considered important within universities and research organizations (Steneck & Bulger, 2007; Kalichman, 2013). An important means to stimulate responsible behavior is to offer trainings for researchers on how to act in a responsible manner and stimulate a positive research culture (Steneck, 2007). The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in the US gives guidance on how to teach integrity courses by indicating which topics should be more openly discussed. These include issues related to conflicts of interest, authorship, replication, and research with human subjects. The ORI also emphasizes the relevance of preventing questionable research practices and indicates how to become more transparent, honest, and accountable for decisions and actions in research practices (Steneck & Bulger, 2007). More and more, such integrity courses are also being taught to students in undergraduate and graduate phases of their studies, next to (early career) researchers. These courses often focus on topics that are related to the research process, and are often referred to as research integrity, as the ORI topics focus primarily on issues that are relevant to people who are involved in research practices. Yet, for many students, their educational journey on integrity issues starts with experiences that are said to belong to the domain of academic integrity, focusing on attitudes of students towards their studies. Macfarlane et al. (2014) state that academic integrity should be defined as “about the values, behavior and conduct of academics in all aspects of their practice” (p. 340) while they also point out that the notion academic integrity is actually commonly interpreted to refer to student behavior only. Indeed, multiple studies on academic conduct focus on various forms of dishonest or non-integer behavior of students, including cheating, not doing one’s fair share of work in a group project, and arbitrarily choosing resources for one’s paper (e.g., Olafson et al., 2014; Simon et al., 2004). In this study, we interpret academic integrity as referring to student behavior, while we also acknowledge that academic integrity is ultimately about values and behavior in academic contexts that should be underlying to this student behavior. Interpreted like this, there is a clear continuum between academic and research integrity, as both take the behavior and values of performance within academia as reference point. It makes sense in the educational journey of students to see how study behavior and behavior in research contexts succeed and overlap each other. We see this clearly when students enter a master program: their experiences with integrity will most likely be in both fields; they already got acquainted with typical topics in the field of research integrity (e.g., how to collect, handle and present data), will also have experiences with academic integrity (the need to be honest and transparent for example) and will have witnessed or experienced breaches of academic integrity (like cheating, cutting corners in the analysis of data etc.). Thus, when studying integrity among students, it is more interesting to combine examples from the fields of academic integrity and research integrity. In the current study we therefore used examples from both fields.
With regards to the literature on academic integrity of students, we find multiple examples of breaches of academic integrity as mentioned above. In the field of research integrity, we also find a wide area of so-called questionable research practices (QRPs) that are much more in the grey area (Steneck, 2007) and which are extensively discussed in the literature (e.g., Vries et al., 2006). In the field of research integrity it is widely acknowledged that many dilemmas are much more in the grey zone, i.e., concern situations that are not clear cases of misconduct, and in which it is sometimes unclear what would be the best thing to do (Vries et al. 2006). We think that it is more likely that students, like researchers, will have encountered grey area issues more frequently than cases of misconduct (Gopalakrishna et al., 2021), despite the fact that high cheating rates are reported in the literature at times (Iqbal et al. 2021).
A focus on grey areas will increase the chances that integrity education relates more closely to experiences of students and also emphasizes that integrity issues are not only about avoiding misconduct, and that there are not always straightforward solutions. Focusing on grey zone cases also stimulates students to see that choices can be made, that it is not always a matter of clear right and wrong when confronted with dilemmas, and that one can learn what it takes to behave responsible. This clearly differs from focusing on what penalties await when one enters the field of misconduct (van den Hoven & Krom, 2020). Therefore, we decided to include grey area issues in a study among students who took a course on integrity as part of the introduction to their master’s degree.
Critical factors with regards to academic integrity and research integrity
When one wants to stimulate upright behavior among students, it is relevant to know which critical factors for academic and research integrity are known. Kisamore et al. (2007) make a distinction between individual factors for academic integrity, “such as gender, age, grade point average, education, and several personality variables”, and situational factors, “such as honor codes, surveillance, rewards/sanctions, peer context, fraternity, or sorority membership and campus housing” (p. 381). Olafson et al. (2014) state that there are multiple, overlapping reasons for cheating behavior, including
“lack of time, procrastination, the decline of morals in society, peer acceptance that cheating is necessary to get good grades, the belief that cheating is too prevalent to stop, and the use of new technology such as finding or buying information on the Internet” (p. 660-1).
With regards to research integrity, similar individual and organizational predictors are found (Langlais, & Bent, 2014).
Gender and integrity
One factor that is frequently mentioned is gender (e.g., Miller et al. 2007). Yet, if gender is a critical factor, how should this be interpreted: are male students more vulnerable to misbehaving, do female and male students have different views or attitudes towards integrity issues, and/or do they behave differently when confronted with an integrity issue? Several studies can be found in the literature focusing on either the attitude of students, suspecting and reporting others, or student behavior towards academic and research integrity, yet many studies still seem inconclusive. We will discuss these below.
Attitude
First, previous research suggests that female researchers have a less favorable attitude towards academic and research misconduct than male. For example, in a meta-analysis on cheating behavior, Whitley Jr et al. (1999) found that female researchers on average had a less positive attitude towards cheating than male researchers and that these “gender differences increased over time” (p. 662). Talib et al. (2013) investigated attitudes towards research misconduct by comparing the mean attitude of male to that of female researchers in a questionnaire covering five types of misconduct: fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, publication-related misconduct, and financial misconduct. They found that female respondents on average were less tolerant to research misconduct than male respondents. To our knowledge, attitudes towards grey area issues in research integrity have so far not been studied from a gender perspective.
Suspecting and reporting others
Simon et al. (2004) found that “women are significantly more likely to report academic dishonesty than are men” (p. 81). Yet, in a study by Kisamore et al. (2007) no convincing support was found for the hypothesis that “males are likely to estimate cheating as occurring more frequently, to suspect and consider misconduct more, and to report cheating less than females” (p. 387). Instead “males actually reported significantly lower perceptions regarding the frequency of cheating than did females” (Kisamore et al., 2007: p. 387 italics added). Horbach et al. (2020) investigated the influence of three power relations in research practices, namely academic seniority, work contracts (permanent vs temporary positions) and gender. To their surprise, they found little difference between male and female respondents regarding the reporting of alleged research misconduct (p. 1609). They also found no substantial differences between male and female respondents in the likeliness of perceiving reporting as having constructive consequences (ibid). Thus, studies have so far been inconclusive, and more research is needed to determine whether female students are more likely to report than male students. We therefore want to address this issue in our study.
Behavior
Previous studies provide some evidence that suggests that female researchers and students are less likely to commit academic misconduct than male. For example, in their meta-analysis, Whitley Jr et al. (1999) found that male students were somewhat more likely to cheat than female students. Yet, they also note that this difference was small and not significant. A possible explanation offered by Whitley derives from a study of McCabe and Trevino (1996), suggesting that more women are working in previously male-dominated academic majors (in Whitley Jr et al., 1999: p. 667). In a study on disciplinary action for academic dishonesty, it was clear that numbers of female students that have to attend disciplinary matters are less prevalent (Witmer & Johansson, 2015). Similarly, in an investigation of misconduct reports between 1994 and 2012, most of which involved fraud, Fang et al. (2013) found an overrepresentation of men: 65% of the cases of misconduct were male, which they note is higher than could be expected based on the male-female distribution in science and engineering. One explanation is that social norms could explain the higher prevalence of misconduct amongst male researchers: risk taking is “more strongly associated with the male gender, while being timid is more strongly associated with the female gender” (Kaatz et al. 2013: p.1). The suggestion that social norms can influence behavior is also found in a study by Huang and Hung (2013), namely that males show higher behavioral integrity under conformity pressure in public, but less integrity in private under pressure to protect themselves. Yet, we also need to be careful with the conclusion that social norms explain gender differences, as it might also be true that females are less likely to be detected, while possibly committing misconduct in similar proportions to male researchers (Kaatz et al., 2013). Thus, also with regards to gender differences behavior, findings are mixed. We therefore decided to include behavioral differences in our study.
The current study
Although previous research provides some evidence that gender is a relevant factor in differences regarding attitudes and behavior on integrity issues and in suspecting and reporting of misconduct, still these findings are inconclusive, often not significant and limited. Many studies tend to focus on only one aspect of integrity (i.e., attitude, behavior, or suspecting and reporting others), and on only one specific topic (e.g., cheating) or on integrity as a general construct rather than distinguishing between the different subjects that integrity can involve. Furthermore, previous research focuses mainly on misconduct, and not much is known yet about the ‘grey areas’ that students and researchers are more likely to be confronted with. The aim of the current study is to generate more encompassing and detailed insight into the role of gender in research integrity by incorporating attitude, suspecting and reporting others, and behavior in one study, and by comparing female and male students on a range of academic and research integrity topics including grey areas.
Our research question is: can we observe differences between male and female students with regards to attitude, suspicion and reporting of misconduct, and (self-reported) behavior? We formulated the following hypotheses, inspired by hypothesis 1 of Kisamore et al. (2007), which were tested.
Hypotheses
H1) Females have a less favorable attitude towards misconduct and grey area issues than males.
H2) Females are more likely to suspect and report fellow students’ misconduct.
H3) Females are less prone to self-report academic misconduct than males.