Ethical decision making among family therapists and individual therapists

In this study, we investigated the ethical decision making of 30 individual and 30 family therapists in order to detect the types of decision making u sed by practicing therapists. Informants responded to three ethical dilemma s. Two of the situations were hypothetical. The third dilemma was a situati on the informant had experienced in practice. Each interview was assessed f or decision-making style, using content analysis. Kohlberg's justice reason ing and Gilligan's care reasoning provided the conceptual foundations for t his analysis. The results suggest that both family and individual therapist s prefer care reasoning on all dilemma types. There was significantly more care reasoning demonstrated on the personal dilemma than on the hypothetica l dilemmas. Characteristics of informants did not provide clear explanation s for the differences found in reasoning.