<p>A strong majority of the questions I have seen on this site relate to technical aspects of statistics such as mathematics, algorithms, and sample design. I am curious if questions about ethics are on-topic here.</p>
<p>Here is an example of a question I am interested in.</p>
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<p>In healthcare we are often concerned with studying the quality of care and clinical outcomes. Patients come from a diverse range of backgrounds when they arrive in a clinical setting, and some of these backgrounds can be accounted for in the analysis. For minorities or under-represented populations there can be relatively few individuals per group, motivating the use of techniques such as mixed effects models rather than doing without pooling. Such techniques exhibit shrinkage in the sense of pulling the random effects sizes toward the fixed effect, which may or may not be biasing in an estimator sense. This shrinkage might result in underestimating how different some of these populations are, leading to decisions that decrease quality of care or clinical outcomes. Is there an ethical way to use mixed effects in an analysis of such populations?</p>
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<p>And yet, I doubt this question is suitable for this site. Questions about ethics require systems of values which can differ in important ways between people, making potential answers subjective. It is also somewhat vague or open-ended. I think such a question is better answered outside of this site by each health authority.</p>
<p>What do you think of the on-topic-ness of questions about the ethics of applying statistics?</p>
