Ryan: Welcome to 10-Minute Tech Comm. This is Ryan Weber at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and I’m very excited to welcome the guest for this episode.
Leslie: I’m Leslie Seawright. I am an Associate Professor of Technical Communication here at Missouri State University. I received my undergrad in communication at the University of Oklahoma, and then I received my MA and PhD at the University of Arkansas. So my primary interests are in, right now, AI, you know, that’s kind of an exciting field for a lot of us right now, so I’m looking at AI, but historically I’ve looked at intercultural technical communication and ethics and communication.
Ryan: Dr. Seawright is the author of Is This Ethical? New Data on the Ethical Principles and Practices of Document Design, available in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication. She authored this work together with Amy Hodges and Timothy Ponce, and they in turn worked off of a study by Sam Dragga from the 90s called Is This Ethical? A Survey of Opinion on Principles and Practices of Document Design.
In 1996, Sam Dragga presented ethical dilemmas to working technical communicators and teachers in order to get their opinion about whether certain behaviors were ethical and what their rationale was for those decisions. In 2025, Seawright et al. repeat this study using some of the same scenarios and also adding some scenarios of their own to reflect more recent ethical dilemmas, such as social media use and issues of diversity and representation.
Their findings are interesting because they show how the field has evolved on its perspective of ethics in the last 30 years. I enjoyed talking with Dr. Seawright about these results, and we also touched briefly on something that I’ve been wanting to cover on this podcast, which is the recent bankruptcy of the Society for Technical Communication. In this case, we discuss the implications for who will now house ethical principles for the field, but I hope that there will be larger discussions on this podcast, as I know they’re happening elsewhere, about what it means for technical communicators to have lost the STC. I hope you enjoy this interview and find it insightful.
Begin Interview
Ryan: Welcome to the podcast, Leslie. We’re really glad to have you here to talk about your interesting study that you did with your co-authors. And, you know, this is built off of a 90s study by Sam Dragga about technical communicator perceptions of visual ethics, and this has been a really influential study. Why did you decide to update that original study?
Leslie: Yeah, I taught this article, Sam Dragga’s original article, in both my beginning technical communication classes and in my graduate classes when we got to our units on document design. This was one of the studies that I always pulled out to talk about. In my beginning technical communication class, I would read the scenarios and then have students actually select if they found the scenario ethical, unethical, and why, and we would, you know, have a whole class period where we would talk about it. And what started happening here recently is that my students, who are now, you know, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, started going, “This was from the 1900s.” And so I thought, well, you’re right, you know, to them 1996 was a long time ago. And even, you know, I started thinking, well, I wonder if attitudes are different. I wonder if our field would still find these things as unethical.
And then there were some that I thought, you know, we don’t have anything on social media. There’s no scenario to talk about diversity. So how could I update this survey even to make it a little more for modern concerns and some things that we see in the field as issues?
So I actually reached out to Sam Dragga. I had met him when I taught at Texas A&M University in Doha, Qatar. We had had him come over as a guest speaker. So I, you know, had a casual kind of acquaintance with him. So I just reached out and I said, “Sam, I love this study. My students love this study. But we’d really like to see how do modern practitioners and professors look at these scenarios? And we want to update a couple.”
And he was really excited. He loved the idea. And he said, absolutely, go for it. He said, you can use any of my scenarios as is, you can change them, you can update them. And then he actually even presented with us at Missouri State University when we were kind of piloting it and had some initial findings. He came and actually presented with us, which was so cool for our students.
Ryan: So this study, the original and yours, is based on kind of giving people these scenarios, sort of like ethical conflict scenarios and then asking them if they feel the behavior is ethical.
Leslie: Correct.
Ryan: And there are scenarios themselves are a little bit long, so I’m trying to think of how to do this in a podcast environment.
Leslie: Right.
Ryan: But do you want to kind of give us a brief summary of, I think, are there six? Is that right? There’s six scenarios.
Leslie: Correct. There are six scenarios. Three are exactly the same or, you know, just a revision that didn’t matter, like updating the years so that they don’t feel like a scenario, you know, that was from 30 years ago. And then we updated the fourth one just a little bit to, you know, kind of modernize it. And then we had two completely new scenarios.
Ryan: Okay.
Leslie: So the scenarios that came from his original study, the first one was on using color in a pie chart. So basically, the scenario is you choose green because it makes things look smaller, like the cost of the organizations, their running costs, and you use red to make things look larger, which is the amount of money they actually spent on, you know, what people had donated the money to. So is this ethical using kind of, you know, making these color choices?
And then scenario two was asking someone to sit in a wheelchair for a picture of your employees in order to try to promote workplace accessibility and diversity when this person is not actually disabled.
Ryan: Because the implication being that there are no visibly disabled members of your corporation.
Leslie: Correct. But you know, you’re open to that you’d like to hire people or you want to be perceived as an employer that does these things. So you know, is that ethical or unethical?
Scenario three was playing with kind of a normal setup of a graph. So you’ve got profits rising over the years, but in actuality, the profits of the company was not increasing, they were actually decreasing, but they flipped the axes. So instead of listing year 1996, 97, 98, 99, and showing the profits going down, they flipped that and said, “Oh, we’ll just do, you know, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997. So it looks like the profits are increasing.”
Ryan: So you’re kind of putting the years in order to show what appears to be an increase narrative when it’s actually.
Leslie: Exactly.
Ryan: Okay.
Leslie: Exactly. Scenario four is looking at an employee evaluation. So you’re the supervisor, you’re evaluating the employee, and you list all of their deficiencies in a paragraph, but all of their accomplishments and kind of good attributes in bullet points.
And then scenario five was our completely new scenario. We asked, is it ethical to represent students on your university as being more diverse than perhaps they actually are? So your diversity rates, maybe 12%. But all of the stock photos that you use for your, you know, kind of advertisements for your university show these diverse groups in much larger percentages.
And then finally, scenario six is about social media. So you manage the social media for your company, and you post about a new software, and you delete all the negative comments that come in and asking, is this ethical?
Ryan: Great. So a lot of different scenarios. You’ve done a great job of very concisely describing them to us.
Leslie: Yes, because in the survey, they are there. They’re about a paragraph and get more information.
Ryan: Right, you get some detail to kind of get the person to think through the scenario. Okay, and so you sent this out, you got what, I believe, 192 responses? Is that correct?
Leslie: Yeah, 195. And we did try to do a little bit more of an international outreach. We still ended up, of course, with a majority of American responses, but we did have 12 countries represented in that.
Ryan: So you had six scenarios. Yes. I’m assuming the way you’re looking for is, you know, do the majority of people feel that each one of these things is ethical or unethical?
Leslie: Right.
Ryan: For the first scenario, the pie charts with the colors, did most people feel that was ethical or unethical?
Leslie: So in the original survey, you had almost 60% say that that was ethical or completely ethical. And in the new survey, we only saw less than 50%. So maybe 45%. So people were seeing all of the scenarios from 1996 as more unethical than they did in 1996, which we thought was a really interesting finding. Even, you know, the wheelchair one was wildly unpopular, even in 1996. But in our new survey, even more people said this is completely unethical and, you know, wild, like you would never want to do something like this.
Ryan: Right.
Leslie: And then in our new scenarios, we found that people also rated those as unethical. There was some more nuance. So we had big percentages of people responding ethics uncertain.
Ryan: Okay. For the diversity and the social media.
Leslie: Correct.
Ryan: Okay. So they didn’t quite know. Do you get a sense of whether, say, more information would have given them more material to decide on or kind of what made them feel uncertain about it? Do we know?
Leslie: So we asked, we had open ended responses for each of these where people could justify their response. And Dragga did this too. So he, you know, coded all of these responses into different categories. And so we did the same. We used his code book and tried to code all of our responses to see how are the justifications different from 1996 to now? And we found for most of his, people were naming a consequence. So if you use these different colors on a pie chart and more people give to your organization, then that’s great. And that’s a really good thing. And you want more money for your organization. So that’s why it’s ethical. So most people were using this thinking about consequences.
And in our survey, the majority of justifications were looking at the writer’s intention. Am I intentionally trying to deceive someone by doing this? So nearly all of the justifications when we’re looking at things that are ethical or unethical, they were saying, you can’t do this. This is a lie. This is deceit. You’re trying to deceive your readers. And that’s why this is unethical. So I thought that was interesting. We really moved from consequences into writer’s intention. And what are they trying to do?
So when we look at those two new scenarios, I think removing the comments could definitely be seen as a writer’s intention. And that’s what we were saying when people were writing them as unethical. But the social media, we had something really interesting that no one talked about in any other justification. And that was this idea of rights. Several people talked about, I have the right to remove these comments. I have the right as the social media person who owns this account to remove them. And some people even said, “You have the right to do this, but it’s probably not great for customer perception. Or maybe this isn’t good.”
It’s the only scenario that we had where people were talking about rights, which I thought was so fascinating that the social media aspect of, “I own this account, I have the right to delete these people.”
Ryan: That’s so interesting. And one of the things I saw in your study, if I’m correct, is that you use Dragga’s original codebook to code the responses, but you also saw that there were things that kind of weren’t accounted for in that original codebook. Is that right?
Leslie: Absolutely. Yes. So when we looked at a lot of the responses, people were using things that they hadn’t talked about at all in 1996.
I can only assume that, right? We didn’t have access to Dragga’s original open-ended survey responses. But I assume since he didn’t code for those things, they might not have been talked about. Accessibility came up a lot in the pie chart scenario. Because as we know, red and green are not good colors for people who have color deficiency. And so a lot of people brought that up, that this is unethical because you are not accounting for the accessibility needs of your viewers and your readers, which I thought was great. So that was something that we didn’t have captured that we saw as something new.
Also, the idea of cultural considerations. In the line graph survey, there were several responses that said this is not common in Western culture to do this this way, right? So you are going against a cultural norm, which is something that Sam hadn’t brought up in the original survey, this kind of concern for cultural consideration. And then finally, we had discussions of social justice and minority groups that came up in both the diversity stock photos and in the wheelchair scenario, saying basically, no, this is not a good use of your skills. You’re not being just to the people in these minority groups.
Ryan: That you’re attempting to represent. This is injustice for those individuals.
Leslie: Yeah, correct.
Ryan: So this is really interesting. So you have been the one, you and your co-authors, who have really been steeped in the older data and the newer data. What can we learn? What is your takeaway on the things that we’ve learned about ethics?
Leslie: I think that one thing that we think is kind of the thread of going from, you know, still unethical, but even more unethical, is that we are talking about this in the field quite a bit. I mean, I spend a lot of time talking about ethics. We have specific classes on ethics and technical communication. And so I think the message is definitely out there that the work that we do has a great deal of impact, and we need to be thinking about these issues of ethics, even when we’re designing documents, even, you know, the words that we choose, the sources that we use. You know, we talk about that a lot now in terms of, you know, ethically using people from different groups as our sources. So there’s a lot of discussion now in academia about this. So I think we’re seeing the students that we taught now out as practitioners, you know, playing these scenarios out.
It was funny how many of the scenarios people would be like, “Oh, this is ridiculous. No one would ever do this. You know, or even this shouldn’t even be on the survey. This is obviously unethical.” But then, you know, right behind that, you’d usually have somebody that’s like, “Yeah, this is completely fine. Like, I would do this. I would do this in my job.” So there’s still a lot of variation.
Ryan: Fascinating. So and this was sort of what I was thinking, too, is maybe one of the takeaways is because of the original article and because of the field’s increased emphasis on ethics, you sort of see some of that change, you know, there and other places. But it does kind of reinforce that teaching about this stuff matters and makes a difference.
Leslie: I think so. You know, from my understanding, STC developed their code of ethics after this article was published. So, I mean, it was part of that discussion. It was definitely in the era of our professional organizations were going, “Hey, we should probably develop a code of ethics.”
That’s something that we discussed in the article, too, because as we all know now, STC is no more. So where has our code of ethics gone? Do we need to have that housed somewhere else? Do we need to look at that again, especially in the era of AI and what we’re doing? And does that impact our jobs? Of course it does. Does that impact our students? Yes. Does that impact our professionalism? And how should we view AI, use AI? So, you know, part of our article is to a call for a new code of ethics that incorporates issues like accessibility, social justice, cultural competence. And now, of course, we have new technology to talk about as well.
Ryan: And my guess is given the time it takes for academic publication to happen that you’ve developed this before sort of the ChatGPT explosion. Is that accurate?
Leslie: We had. But I can tell you now we currently have a survey that is we’re at 200 responses now already where we adapted the scenarios that AI did these things. So is it ethical if AI chose your colors, if AI did your line graph this way, if AI created a picture of a person in a wheelchair for your brochure, is that ethical? And so, yes. So it did. You know, the research started before ChatGPT came on the scene. But now we’re like, “OK, so what does this mean if AI is doing these things for us?”
Ryan: Great. Is that still an open survey?
Leslie: It is. It is. Can I get you the link?
Ryan: Yeah. Give me the link and I’ll put it in the show notes in case that is listening wants to complete the survey. Yeah. So if you’re listening and it’s recently you know, this episode is recently dropped, then fill this survey out, please.
Leslie: Yes.
Ryan: So what else what are the takeaways that you want kind of technical communicators in the field or students who are about to become technical communicators? What would be kind of your message to them about these results?
Leslie: So I think we have gotten through, especially in areas like accessibility, social justice, cultural considerations, I think that we do see practitioners and professors thinking about those things. What I think is still interesting is there are some responses that are looking more from like a utilitarian lens where the respondent was saying something along the lines of “This is my employer. This is how I feed my family. And if this is what my employer asked me to do, that’s what I’m going to do.”
And, you know, I think we’ve worked really hard on the academic side thinking about, hey, you know, this is your responsibility and this is what you need to do. But of course, we know that the workplace has different expectations, and often those conversations are not happening. And people who work for a living and feed their family by working for a living do sometimes make choices that, you know, maybe they don’t want to make or that they wouldn’t make otherwise, or maybe they’re not even thinking about that anymore. They’re just saying, “This is what my boss wants me to do, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
Ryan: I’ve got a hundred things to do today. This is one of them. I’m not going to spend that much time.
Leslie: I’m not going to worry about that. Exactly. And that’s what I really love about the code of ethics for engineers, because they speak specifically to clients. And that code of ethics is directed to be both engineering focused and faced and client facing to basically say, “We’re not going to do anything that jeopardizes people’s health, safety, well-being.”
And I think, you know, maybe if we’re going to look at redoing our code of ethics, we take a more direct approach towards employers, employees, clients, you know, our responsibilities to society versus just our responsibility to an employer.
Ryan: Right, right. Responsibilities to users, kind of all these different groups that we have. So this engineering code, is that IEEE?
Leslie: Yes.
Ryan: And this is a great question. I mean, you’ve mentioned this, you know, where this is August of 2025 and January, February of 2025 STC announced their bankruptcy. So the whole field is kind of reeling from, you know, where we go next. And this is a great question. Who would develop and house the, you know, 2025 code of ethics for technical communicators, which needs to cover stuff like AI and globalism and the environment in ways that maybe we weren’t thinking about in the 90s.
Leslie: Right. And, you know, STC was kind of this great bridge of trying to have the practitioners and the professors, right, having the academic side and the actual people in the field work together. And so do we have another organization that has that reach? Do we have another organization that could pull in the practitioner side? We need to look at that and see, even if that’s not happening today, is there an organization that has the resources to try to do some of that? And I don’t know, I don’t know who that is. And again, maybe it shouldn’t even be housed in an organization because organizations come and go, apparently. You know, I don’t think any of us thought STC was going anywhere anytime soon, but wow, there it went.
Ryan: Well, this is really interesting. I love that you updated this study. I think that this kind of work is really important. Again, especially as you said, you know, to our students, they weren’t even born in the 90s. This might as well be, you know, the 1950s or the 1920s. I mean, it’s so long ago. So it’s really exciting to see this work getting updated.
Leslie: Thank you. Yeah. As my son reminds me nearly every day, Mom, you were born in the 1900s.
Ryan: So it was a hundred years ago.
Leslie: It was so long ago.
Ryan: Well, thank you, Leslie, for your insight and the great work that you did.
Leslie: Thank you so much for having me on. This was fun.