A sociological analysis of academic ethics and identity in the Corona era: A mixed study

Maher, Zahra

doi:10.22035/jous.2024.5071.1046

A sociological analysis of academic ethics and identity in the Corona era: A mixed study

Document Type : Original Research Paper

Author

Zahra Maher

Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

10.22035/jous.2024.5071.1046

Abstract

With the spread of the corona virus in Iran and elsewhere in the world, universities were forced to either close and implement the virtual education program without planning, which not only lacked the necessary structures rather professors and students too had been unprepared for the given scenario. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the perceptions and lived experience of professors and students at the University of Isfahan with regard to the status of "academic identity" and "normative commitment" in virtual scientific communities. This research has applied a mixed approach (qualitative-quantitative) to study the subject under investigation. In the qualitative part, the "phenomenology" method has been used while in the secondary quantitative stage, in order to collect the required data, using quota sampling method, 390 people were selected for interview through a questionnaire. The findings showed that harms related to normative commitment in the University of Isfahan were: scientific dishonesty, violation of privacy, formal and unreal presence, abnormality in evaluation and misuse of technology. Also, there were the deficiency of academic identity in the course of virtual education, which has crystallized in the form of weakness of individual and collective academic identity and deficiency of social presence.

Keywords

virtual education

academic identity

normative commitment

mixed research method

University of Isfahan

Subjects

University, Communications and Cyber Space

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