Survey of ethical reasoning at Chiang Mai university faculty of business administration: Support for international ethics education standards

Abstract

© 2017, Southeast Asian Association for Institutional Research. All rights reserved. The Chiang Mai University (CMU) Faculty of Business Administration recently initiated research to assess levels of moral reasoning in its graduate and senior-level undergraduate students with the objective to gauge the areas of needed improvement in its ethics education curriculum. This objective also supports the Faculty’s recent application for AACSB International accreditation and the Thai government’s current emphasis on ethics education to combat workplace and public institution corruption. The instrument used to assess moral reasoning is the revised version of the Defining Issues Test. The instrument was translated into the Thai language. Regression analysis was used for these analyses. While the predominant level of moral reasoning for all sample sub-groups in the study was at the maintaining-norms level of moral reasoning, the results also revealed that the undergraduate Finance majors demonstrated statistically and significant higher levels of post conventional moral reasoning than the other undergraduate business majors. Comparing these current findings with the previous measurements of moral reasoning of sample groups of US students, significant overall differences in levels of moral reasoning between The CMU and sample groups of US students were detected. The CMU students tend to make ethical decisions based on status-quo moral reasoning (maintaining norms), while sample groups of US students tend to utilize to a greater degree higher level principled (post-conventional) moral reasoning. These findings signal the need for more research into the potential causes of the higher levels of moral reasoning among the CMU undergraduate finance majors compared to other CMU business administration students.