The aim of this study is to establish structured clusters and well-defined ontological entities (nodes) describing ethical values as both ideal and opportunity for ethical manner as perceived by the caregiver. In this study, we use Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) to analyse ethical values (ethos) and ethical manners in daily work with older people. Material is based on questionnaire data collected by the instrument for the self-assessment of individual ethos in the care of older people (ISAEC) in spring 2007 in a municipality in Western Finland. This study is unique in its kind, both concerning the selected approach and methodological questions. BBNs have not been used significantly in nursing research, nor are there any studies that examine the ethical possibilities with focus on the probable effects upon changing conditions. 1. Introduction Ethical discussions between caregivers affect the quality of the older person’s care, and ？gren Bolmsj？ et al. [1] have found that ethical decision-making supports ethically good care of patients. Berggren et al. [2] associate the discussion of ethical values with a deeper level of communication, and in order to achieve depth in such a dialogue, an ethical code and a set of ethical values which penetrate caring are needed. Awareness of such ethical values equips caregivers with a freedom and strength to make conscious decisions to do well and to do right in a given care situation. A caregiver’s ability to do well and do right is strengthened in the dialogue between caregivers and other health care professionals [3]. In this study, we use Bayesian Belief Networks [4, 5] (BBNs) to analyse ethical values (ethos) and ethical manners in daily work with older people. The advantage with BBNs is the possibility to use and compute with symbolic (symbolic data has no per se measurable or comparable values), as opposed to numeric or nominal (… 1,2,3,4,5 are nominal not to be seen as numerical …), data. Linear regression and comparable methods require numeric data for its computations. Data used in this study are nominal in the answers to questions in the questionnaire, but inherently symbolic when arriving at ethical data and classifications of ethical manner. Further, BBNs are able to manage stochasticity and uncertainty and can work simultaneously with objective and subjective probabilities in one and the same model. Material is based on questionnaire data collected by the instrument for the self-assessment of individual ethos in the care of older people (ISAEC) in spring 2007 in a municipality in Western Finland [6]. The
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