Aiding and Abetting Scientific Integrity in U.S. Federal Government Agencies

Science can play a critical role in supporting sound public administration and policy decisions. However, the value that science provides to government decision-making is contingent on a government’s scientific integrity standards and the degree to which employees adhere to those standards when conducting, managing, using, or communicating about science. Within the U.S. federal government, scientific integrity standards have historically been defined and applied inconsistently, at times resulting in harmful government actions. Since at least 2000, the U.S. Congress and several executive administrations have taken steps to strengthen scientific integrity in government operations. One recent step included requiring all federal government agencies to develop scientific integrity policies. However, it was unclear if the scientific integrity policy guidance disseminated to agencies—and the agency policies informed by that guidance—were consistent with extant literature on employee performance and policy compliance. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the employee requirements articulated within extant literature that are potentially important or essential for enabling employees to comply with scientific integrity policies and adhere to scientific integrity standards; determine in what ways, if at all, U.S. federal government scientific integrity guidance and U.S. federal agency scientific integrity policies directly or indirectly addressed those requirements; and explain observed similarities and differences in the employee requirements addressed within the literature, government guidance, and agency policies. An examination of extant literature resulted in the identification of 15 employee requirements for scientific integrity policy compliance. Content analysis was then used to analyze eight scientific integrity guidance documents and 24 agency scientific integrity policies against the requirements. The results demonstrated that guidance documents and agency policies only partially addressed the critical employee requirements identified through the literature, suggesting that extant literature was not leveraged to develop those documents. The results also revealed strong similarities between the government’s model scientific integrity policy and agency policies. The study’s results may be explained through the two communities theory, bounded rationality, bounded awareness, incrementalism, and neoinstitutional theory. Findings from the study may be used to inform strategic human resource management approaches for achieving employee compliance with scientific integrity and other organizational policies.