Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy

Friday, April 20, 2012

Happy Birthday to Our Blog


Hi Folks!!

Happy Birthday seems appropriate.

As I stated on the very first post, this blog was an outgrowth from the Pennsylvania Psychological Association's decision to change their web site and scrap our bulletin board.

The overarching goals of the prior bulletin board and this blog are to raise awareness about ethics and to help students and professionals become better psychologists.  The blog has greatly expanded our ability to provide multi-media content to viewers.

Since this blog was an experiment of sorts, I had some minor goals in mind whether to keep this going after one year.

One goal was to have 150 individuals follow by email.  I wanted to be able to reach 150 people per day so that there would be critical mass of individuals who were reading the content.  Put differently, I did not want to spend a great deal of time and energy for minimal gain.  Currently, there are 170 individual who follow the blog via email.

I also hoped that the blog had about 20,000 page hits at the one year mark.  Again, my thinking was that others who did not subscribe to the email service would visit this site occasionally (if not regularly).  Perhaps professors would have students check out the site.  Perhaps supervision groups would use some of the material, such as the vignettes.  And, I had no idea that there would be any international interest whatsoever.  The current page view count is well over 64,000.

Aside from these numbers, I have had quite a few surprises.

First, there have been some psychologists and students reaching out for support.  Whether it was an ethics question or the internship match day, we have responded in ways that have been helpful.  I appreciate that students and psychologists felt comfortable to ask questions.  I also appreciate those who were willing to pitch in and write responses or answer questions.

Next, the number of international viewers has been truly staggering.  As of today, people from 101 countries have read material from the blog.  Readers from the United Kingdom, the Ukraine, and Germany  have over 2,000 page views.  Canada, Russia, China, and Australia have over 1,000 page views.  International readers have accounted for 35% of the total page views.  Please keep reading, and spread the word.

Third, the vignettes have been high volume reads.  My hope is that readers are using these dilemmas as teaching tools or ways to start discussions about ethics with colleagues or during presentations.

The blog has been a success by most measures. 

To that end, I want to thank Ken Pope and Gary Schoener for providing information that did not pop up on my feedreader.  Sam Knapp's contributions have also been a huge part of blog articles.  I also want to thank everyone who has contributed powerpoint presentations, papers, articles, or other information to make the blog this successful.

Having been able to find so many articles and stories about ethics, new material has popped up on a daily basis.  So, we will continue to forge ahead for another year.  I cannot promise daily content as life continues to be hectic.  However, I will try to continue to post high quality stories, vignettes, and articles.

Thank you for reading.  Thank you for enjoying and promoting ethics.

John Gavazzi
Blog Founder
Ethics Educator
Psychologist