Cracking The Code: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Canadian Code Of Ethics For Psychologists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hailed as “possibly the best psychologists’ code of ethics anywhere in the world” (Hadjistavropoulos, 2009, p. 4), the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists represents a powerful ethical and professional standard for practitioners of psychology. This ethical code boasts a strong theoretical and empirical basis, prediction and consistency, high educational value and relevance, and an empowering advantage for its users – psychologists. Yet, critical and feminist examinations of the CPA Code have identified problems with the Code, including its underlying structure and values, lack of regard for social justice, and ignorance of human subjectivity. These scholars’ critiques expose the problematic ideology of the CPA Code, throwing into question the ethical implications of this ethical code. Joining this broader project of critical psychology examining the undercurrents and effects of power in the discipline, this dissertation seeks to understand how the CPA Code produces ethical-professional practices and subjectivities. Framing this research within discourse, power, and governmentality or “the conduct of conduct,” I draw on the work of Michel Foucault and Foucauldian-informed psychologists to interrogate the ways in which the “ethical” practitioner is produced by the CPA Code. Further interested to explore the ethical-professional constructions of individuals and groups of people historically marginalized in Canadian society, I also analyze the CPA Code’s supplementary documents Guidelines for Ethical Psychological Practice with Women (CPA, 2007) and the Guidelines for Non-discriminatory Practice (CPA, 2001). This discourse analysis discovers the many dominant and appropriated discourses of the CPA Code, subject positions, as well as the discursive rules reinforcing the discourse practices and subjects. Dominant discourses constructing the CPA Code are science, objectivity, competence, expertise, legal, managerialism, and risk management discourses. Appropriated discourses are critical inquiry, betterment of society, and morality discourses. Sites where discursive rules are reproduced are education and training, licensure and regulation, ethical decision-making, consultation, and misconduct adjudication. Subjectivities of psychologists and clients are discussed. These findings are contextualized within Foucauldian theory and the broader critical psychology literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".