Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 46

Those who will be participating in the evaluation must be fully informed about the its purpose and must explicitly provide their consent for the outcomes of their participation to be used. By ‘participation’ it is meant those who will be interviewed, surveyed, invited to participate in scoping workshops, and so forth.

However, in some contexts it can be very difficult to draw the line between formal participation and informal participation. In some cases the evaluator will spend a good number of days in context, holding several conversations with different people who may not regard these as moments for data gathering.

Therefore, at the beginning of any evaluation, all stakeholders should be informed about the evaluation, about the team, and about the roles of those involved. Indeed good practice here is to provide all stakeholders with the original terms of reference, clearly state who is commissioning the evaluation, and inform participants of the planned objectives and future uses of the findings.

In most research projects, participants are required to sign a consent letter. In evaluations this is not always common practice although it should be. Those who manage evaluations should – by default – ask evaluators to collect the signed consent forms/letters and annex these to the final evaluation documentation. This is more important in evaluations where the legal risk is heightened.

Evaluators should also consider the need for ‘rolling consent’ particularly when either:

 an emergent evaluation design is being used, making it difficult for consent given at the start to the evaluation process to fully anticipate what participation will later entail (Simons 2006), and/or

 participant engagement will be sustained over time