Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 44

Evaluations will sometimes be scrutinised by an Ethics Committee. Ethics Committees have long operated in the field of medication research and evaluation but are increasingly common in other areas of social science. For example, it is common practice for universities to constitute ethics committees to scrutinise social science research and evaluation proposals.

Simons (2006) identifies five concerns about ethics committees. Firstly, while they provide scrutiny at the start of a research process they cannot anticipate all the ethical issues that might emerge during the research. Secondly, while they tend to adopt the principle of ‘respect for persons’ this cannot entail respect for every human action. In moral and ethical debate there are always ‘trade-offs’. Thirdly, because such committees often have their origins in medical research they tend to be more familiar with quantitative than qualitative research methods. Fourthly, such committees increasingly act as ‘guardians’ of research design, making judgements about what counts as research methodology. And finally, some ethics committees are concerned not only with ethical issues, but also with acting as research gatekeepers or defenders of institutional reputations, or with preventing litigation.