  Gillikin (2017) defines a 'practice standard' as a document to 'define the
way the profession's body of knowledge is ethically translated into day-to-day
activities' (Gillikin 2017, p. 1). Such documents fulfill three objectives:
they 1) define the profession; 2) communicate uniform standards to
stakeholders; and 3) reduce conflicts between personal and professional conduct
(Gillikin, 2017 p. 2). However, there are many guidelines - this is due to
different purposes that guidance writers may have, as well as to the fact that
there are different audiences for the many guidance documents. The existence of
diverse statements do not necessarily make it clear that there are
commonalities; and while some statements are explicitly aspirational,
professionals as well as the public need to know that ethically-trained
practitioners follow accepted practice standards. This paper applies the
methodological approach described in Tractenberg (2023) and demonstrated in
Park and Tractenberg (2023) to study alignment among international guidance for
official statistics, and between these guidance documents and the ASA Ethical
Guidelines for Statistical Practice functioning as an ethical practice standard
(Tractenberg, 2022-A, 2022-B; after Gillikin 2017). In the spirit of exchanging
experiences and lessons learned, we discuss how our findings could inform
closer examination, clarification, and, if beneficial, possible revision of
guidance in the future.
