Ethics Committee, Institutional Processes, and Education: Development and Validation of an Ethical Guide and Educational Toolkit of Best Practices for UFRN
Ethics; Public Servants; Ethical Processes.
This study aimed to develop and validate an ethical guide accompanied by an educational set of best practices for the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), designed to provide guidance on conduct and the management of ethical-administrative processes. The proposal emerged from the identification of difficulties faced by public servants in understanding regulations, accessing information, and navigating ethical procedural workflows. This is a methodological, descriptive, and exploratory study with a qualitative and quantitative approach, conducted at UFRN’s main campus. The research was developed through a literature review, document analysis, interviews with public servants, and validation of the educational product by the institution’s Ethics Committee. The guide was developed using the Design Thinking approach, structured into five interdependent stages: empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. The empathy stage enabled the understanding of employees’ difficulties and needs regarding institutional ethical processes; the definition stage helped identify the main problems related to understanding and managing ethical administrative workflows; the ideation stage fostered the collaborative development of solutions for the guide; the prototyping stage allowed the creation of initial versions of the material; and the testing stage contributed to the validation of the content, applicability, and clarity of the product with participants.