Issn 1983-8034 Ethics, bioethics and physical education

Method

A systematic qualitative review was carried out in January 2020, to systematize what the national and international scientific literature has published in terms of discussions on ethics and bioethics in relation to PE, in addition to indicating the knowledge gaps that must be investigated in further studies. To increase the rigor of the review, five steps were followed:

1. 
   Choice of descriptors;
   
2. 
   Selection of databases for searching;
   
3. 
   Establishment of sample selection criteria;
   
4. 
   General analysis of the research results;
   
5. 
   Definition of the final sample ¹³.
   

In order to better delimit the field of production of the addressed topic, the following

Research
Descriptors in Health Sciences (DeCS) were used, in Portuguese, English, and Spanish languages: “bioethics,” “ethics,” and “physical education.” Only these three descriptors were chosen because they were more comprehensive at the time of the investigation. The search was performed in the following databases: Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature (LILACS), Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Web of Science, Virtual Health Library (VHL), and National Library of Medicine (PubMed). The search was also carried out on multidisciplinary databases and in the fields of education and physical education: Scopus, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), and SPORTDiscus.
The PubMed database used the search strategy with terms registered in the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and words, such as “all fields,” to aggregate studies that have not yet been indexed. For the LILACS, SciELO, and Web of Science databases, the search strategy was used with the health descriptors, organized according to the Boolean operators “and” and “or” to retrieve the qualified information.
In the selection of articles, the following inclusion criteria were considered: full texts, with free access via the database portal of the Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), Portal de Periódicos Capes, in Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish, addressing the “ethics” and/or “bioethics” topics and their direct relation to PE. No criteria were established regarding the time limit for performing the studies. The exclusion criteria were: studies with clinical research design, editorials, theses and dissertations, evaluation of protocols on physical activity programs, and reviews. Moreover, a backward searching was performed based on the references of the identified articles, that is, the search for references cited in the studies identified during the research.
Data was examined using the thematic content analysis technique proposed by Bardin ¹⁴, with the following steps: 1) pre-analysis (organization of the articles selected in the review); 2) investigation of the material; 3) treatment of results; 4) inferences; and 5) interpretation. To aid content analysis, the Atlas.ti software version 7 was used. This study results from research carried out by the authors within the scope of the Graduate Program in Public Health of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC).