The Ethical and Social Issues of Information Technology: A Case Study

Abstract

The present study is conducted among 283 students from University of Zabol to identify the harm and ethical and social issues in the field of information technology and to classify the immoral practices that students are doing in this field. First various important issues in the field of IT in the social and ethical areas are discussed. Then the cases considered as the most commonly used immoral activities, are selected for evaluation, and the participants ranked these activities according to the method presented in the questionnaire. These activities are examined and analyzed descriptively by SPSS program, reliability of the questionnaire is measured by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, Bartlett Test of Sphericity and KMO index and the validity of the results is verified using T-test and the results are ranked based on the first performance that happens frequently and the last performance that happens rarely or never. Finally, a set of strategies are presented for preventing ethical abuse in the field of Information Technology so that the challenges are reduced.