An Exploratory Investigation of Information Technology Ethics Factors

Information technology (IT) has proliferated at an unprecedented rate in our society. Technical advances have come quickly yet the social and ethical infrastructure to support these advances has been slow in development. A group of individuals have developed a general code of ethical conduct for information technology professionals to begin to identify the proper ethical choices that IT professionals should make. This paper examines this code and explores whether there are underlying ethical constructs that underlie the code. After examining ten key provisions of the code, it was found through exploratory factor analysis that there were two factors which emerged—information technology integrity and information technology security. There were found to be no differences in level of agreement with these IT ethical factors based on several demographic variables. The implications of these finding for educators, researchers and practitioners are briefly discussed.