Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 41

‘Ethics is about how we behave or should behave as individuals and as part of the society in which we live in interaction with others’ (Simons 2006). Evaluation is a relatively new discipline and it is only quite recently that ethical considerations and the structures and processes to address them have become prominent in the sector.

In the early pages of their chapter on the ethics of social research, Hesse-Biber and Leavy state that ‘[T]he history of the development of the field of ethics in research, unfortunately, has largely been built on egregious and disastrous breaches of humane ethical values’ (2010: 60). Their example is a public health study of untreated cases of latent syphilis in human subjects in the context of which, despite the existing scientific knowledge at the start of the study and of the subsequent scientific advances, participating patients were observed on the basis of an outdated therapy.

Particularly after the Second World War, as biomedical research became increasingly regulated from an ethical point of view, ethical issues in social and to an extent psychological research remained largely ignored. When the ethics in social and psychological research began being addressed more systematically, the onus was on the treatment of the research ‘subjects’ – research ethics and researchers’ ethical behaviour were determined by how the ‘subjects’ of the research would be treated.

Ethical considerations in evaluations came even later and a few evaluation societies have led on this. For example, the American Evaluation Association’s Guiding Principles for Evaluators were adopted by the Association in 1994 (Simons 2006).

In this chapter, we begin by distinguishing ethics in evaluation from ethical considerations in other forms of social research. We then take a brief look at some of the ethical guidelines for evaluation that have been published and the role of ethics committees in evaluation. The main part of this chapter considers the ethics inherent to the design and implementation of evaluations as well as the evaluation practices that in some key sectors may pose ethical risks. We set out guiding principles that relate to participants’ and stakeholders’ rights and should govern evaluators’ inherent ethics and ethical behaviour. We also discuss the limitations to ethical guidelines.

We next look at challenges to ensuring ethical evaluations, considering two types of challenge: those relating to the implementation of certain methods and those relating to exogenous factors.