Question

Assume that you are a program director who has recently hired a university-based researcher to evaluate your program. This was done because a major foundation has expressed an interest in financially supporting your program, but only if it proves to be “evidence-based.” What might be your ethical concerns? How might you ensure that these are addressed while also endorsing rigorous scientific methods?

Answer 1

Program evaluations

Program evaluations seek to find out positive and negative outcomes of programs and the consequences for the organization and for the stakeholders.

Protecting the rights of study participants is what an ethically grounded evaluation seeks to do. Especially when it involves human subjects. It is mostly done in the field of medicine wherein patient care decisions are based upon evidence based research. The reports of such research are significant and will be followed for years to come.

Rigorous scientific method

This entails, strict application of the scientific method. The experimental design must be robust and unbiased. The rules of rigor may differ depending upon the methodology adopted. But,the methodology analysis, interpretation and reporting should all be open to scrutiny. The study must be replicable.

Ethical issues

Some ethical issues are – consent, conflict of interest, confidentiality, international collaboration or assistance, data storage, publication of research and relationship with media.

The evaluator must follow guidelines too: his inquiry has to be systematic, he must be competent in terms of skills, knowledge and training, honest in his dealings with the researchers and the participants, must be sensitive while dealing with participants and must be aware of the broader implications of the research being discussed.

One approach is that of participatory evaluation. It works at involving all the stakeholders in the research to further learning and use the research.

• Consent – the participant is apprised of the overall experience, benefits if any, private information that will be collected and used, compensation that will be provided, his rights as a participant, possible injuries or side effects, written consent that is voluntary. In case the participant is a minor the consent has to be from a parent or guardian. There are few conditions where consent is waived.
• Confidentiality – correct recruitment of participants and sharing the confidentiality information with them, how the data collected is going to be used, decide and share information about who used the data collected
• Data storage – data stored by numbers so that participants cannot be identified, delete personal information that is not relevant, data to be stored in password protected computers
• Publication of research – Very crucial to publish the results with all the necessary references and in the laid down manner