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Ethical Issues

The community profile is used in professional community health and development to:

• record the health or community worker's knowledge of the community
• increase critical awareness in the community
• empower the community to construct and control of knowledge of itself.

The community profile is an exercise in information gathering, analysis and presentation which serves the professional needs of the Aboriginal health and community development worker. Its primary purpose is pragmatic, related to the practice of social change. In a meaningful sense it of course proper to refer to the community profile as research. Because the main purpose of the community profile has to do with professional practice (or learning professional practice), rather than the production of knowledge or theory, it is not classified administratively as research activity. Community profiles are subject to codes of professional ethics rather than guidelines for research ethics.

It is important to respect the privacy of the community and its members. Any information which is not available from public sources, and is not given to you specifically to be included in the community profile, should not be included. Questions which cannot be answered from public records or other sources in the public domain should remain unanswered, unless community members volunteer that information and agree to have it included.

Explain the purpose of the community profile truthfully and clearly. The main purpose for this profile is to help your learning. If any organisation in the community requires a community profile for their own purposes, you can help with this, or offer to give a copy of your profile to them. If the profile has another purpose for the community, you must still tell people who provide information that you are a student, and that the community profile is an assignment.

The code of ethics of the Australian Institute of Welfare and Community Workers can be taken as a guide to what is expected. The professional obligations particularly relevant to the community profile are:

• to share knowledge, information and skills with community members,
  
• to regard all information disclosed in the course of practice concerning individual and community clients as confidential,
  
• to be accountable to the community and the employing agency (or the University),
  
• to treat client communities with respect,
  
• to promote self-worth, dignity and autonomy of client communities,
  
• to bring behaviour which may be unethical to the attention of colleagues or supervisors,
  
• to maintain proper standards of practice, and uphold principles and ethics at all times.

In addition, workers in Aboriginal communities have a special obligation to promote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-determination.