IIER 2, 1. 99. 2: Thompson - the ethics and politics of evaluation. Issues in educational research Vol 2, No 1, 1. This paper examines ethical difficulties arising from an evaluation study and puts forward for discussion a code of ethics designed to resolve these. For some, the issues will be addressed a priori, and be part of the research design; while others, particularly those involved in evaluation, will confront them in an unexpected fashion as the research unfolds. More often than not, the latter situation pertains, as Sungalia (1. I had come to evaluate the work of an educational planning unit. But what transpired as the real purpose of my study? I learned in time that I .. The hapless and perhaps somewhat naive evaluator, one who moves from educational research into the field of evaluation, can very quickly become embroiled in the politics of evaluation. That is, there often is the urge for clients to view evaluation as a means for marketing their 'product', rather than as an equitable means of assessing its merit. Scriven (1. 98. 1, p. It is an evaluation which is conducted for the in- house staff of the program and normally remains in- house. This is somewhat different from summative evaluation which Scriven (1. This distinction allows for the evaluation audience to be identified prior to commencement of the study and so those involved will know beforehand the nature and possible consequences of the undertaking. In theory, therefore, this distinction between formative and summative evaluation is important because it allows participants to provide information, knowing in advance who their audience will be. In practice, however, political and personal differences amopng program staff can make even formative evaluation a task fraught with ethical difficulties related to the collection and disclosure of data. The program required a significant amount of community involvement. Members of the local community were trained to work with small groups of students, as 'community tutors', on self- concept enhancing and team building exercises. In addition to this, an executive committee, also made up of community members, was created to coordinate the management of the program. The functions of this committee were to: raise funds for the program; give approval for and allocate funding to the components of the program as they were implemented; and take over continued implementation in 1. Another significant role of the committee was to provide a forum for the airing of disparate views on, and interests in, the program. This was deemed to be important, because one of the program's characteristics was a flexibility which permitted the incorporation of ideas put forward by members of the local community. This was necessary because 'stakeholders' from the community were viewed as having the potential to change the program significantly through their input. Thus, the source, nature and effect of these changes needed to be recorded and evaluated. This workbook applies the CDC Framework for Program Evaluation in Public Health. Developing an effective evaluation report: Setting the course for. Hosp Community Psychiatry. The politics of program evaluation: the mental health experience. Stockdill JW, Sharfstein SS. Download this Research Paper on politics and program evaluation getting and 90,000+ more research papers written by professionals and peers. Planning a Program Evaluation G3658-1. Acknowledgements For their timely and thoughtful review of this publication, the authors wish to thank. Where Politics and Evaluation Research Meet CAROL H. The politics of program survival is an ancient and important art. Brief 1: Overview of Policy Evaluation. Although policy evaluation and program evaluation have many similarities, there are some important differences as well. Program evaluation is a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using information to answer questions about projects, policies and programs, particularly. To this end, the roles, actions and motives of individuals and groups within the community who participated in the program were clearly identified as frames of reference for evaluation. It is in this part of the evaluation that ethical problems were encountered. This was of particular importance because the main mode of data collection was to be interviews and, in the course of being interviewed, subjects were likely to reveal personal and/or private information which they might not want to be made public. For this reason, I was acutely aware of the need to guarantee participants' rights to privacy. Rules of access and consultation give individuals opportunities to decide what to share, to reflect on what they have shared, to edit or comment upon their information in context: to control, in other words, the use of their own information. Vol 2, No 1, 1992, 35-44. The ethics and politics of evaluation Andrew Thompson Wanneroo Primary School Evaluation can be regarded as a distinct branch of social. The politics of program evaluation are discussed from the personal perspective of the Director of the General Accounting Office's Program Evaluation and Methodology.Also contained in this document was a detailed description of individuals' rights under the ethical code I had adopted. In summary, these rights were. Potential participants could decide whether to become involved in the evaluation on the basis of information supplied to them detailing the scope, methods and usefulness of the evaluation. In discussing the process of evaluation, House (1. At its simplest, evaluation leads to a settled opinion that something is the case. It does not necessarily lead to a decision to act in a certain way, though today it is often intended for that purpose.. Evaluation leads to a judgment about the worth of something. In the case of the program I evaluated, the execution of this role required me to judge the actions of individuals in the context of their vested interests and motivations for becoming involved in the program. Thus, as evaluator I became involved in the . This feature of evaluation emphasises the difficulties the evaluator faces in trying to maintain the balance between protecting the rights of individuals and remaining independent and unbiased. The fact that evaluation focuses on the particular (Simons, 1. The requirement that evaluation be useful in making value judgments also means that the evaluator must weigh the merit of the actions of individuals and then report to an audience which, if it is not made up of the same individuals, will include people associated with them. The usual devices, such as the suppression of names and specific locations, do not guarantee anonymity because the audience's knowledge of the scene would lead, just by inference, to their recognition of people and places no matter how they were disguised. Thus, the evaluator is faced with a number of problems: maintaining his/her independence and ensuring that the evaluation is free from bias; protecting the rights of participants; and reporting in such a way that the private lives of participants are not exposed to public scrutiny and judged as part of the evaluation. This brings us back again to the distinction between what is private and what is public. The previous weekend there had been a major casts in the implementation of the program. Because of this, I questioned the committee chairperson about the crisis and his actions in dealing with it. The answers to my questions revealed some very interesting data which I considered to be highly relevant to the evaluation for the following reasons. The way in which this person had resolved the crisis indicated a willingness on his part to act unilaterally and without the approval of other committee members. A few weeks later, the transcript was returned to me with the following note attached. I have ammended . I would like your final report to be available for public reading and I don't think these comments would allow that. Through these changes it was made clear to me that, on my behalf, the committee chairperson had decided what was and was not relevant to the evaluation. It also showed that this person was willing to use his rights as a subject of the evaluation to censor data and to ensure that the evaluation was neither independent nor unbiased. As the evaluator, I have no doubt that the data should be seen as public, because they affected the implementation of the program and thus they dealt with actions carried out in the public arena. This person, however, wanted his actions to remain private, because their revelation in the public arena would have been damaging to him in terms of his standing as a public figure in the community. Any competent researcher would guarantee these rights to participants explicitly in negotiating to pursue his/her research. Moreover, in the case of disagreements over the relevance of data to the research, such disputes could often be solved by reassuring the individuals that their identities will not be revealed and that the audience for the research report will be at least once removed from the research site. If necessary, the researcher could discontinue the research and pursue the same problem at another site, although this would only be a consideration in extreme circumstances. The distinctive characteristics of evaluation bring into question the usual guarantees of privacy and anonymity the evaluator is able to offer participants. Ultimately, it is not possible to shift the focus of an evaluation to another site, because it is particular instances or programs that are of interest. Furthermore, offering participants in an evaluation the right to privacy also has the potential to cause disputes over what is private and what is relevant to the evaluation. This is clearly illustrated in the committee chairperson's censorship of his interview transcript. If an evaluation is to remain independent and unbiased, and thus useful in its role of permitting judgments of value and worth and informing decision making, those who are to be evaluated must, to some degree, be prepared for their actions and interests to be revealed in the evaluation report. This is reasonable, because the evaluation must be necessary for clients' continued functioning, otherwise they would not have requested it in the first place. With this in mind, I would argue that, particularly in cases where the audience and those whose actions are to be evaluated are one and the same (as is usual in a formative evaluation), clients need to be made aware that they cannot use the right to privacy to obstruct the evaluator in making a fair and reasonable attempt to do the job they have requested. The line of demarcation between what is private and what is public should be drawn through a process of careful negotiation. In carrying out this negotiation, I would like to suggest the following guidelines. The commissioners of the evaluation should check the credentials of the evaluator(s) to satisfy themselves that they are competent for the job at hand. This discussion should result in a clear and unambiguous written statement of the terms of reference of the evaluation which is agreed upon by all parties.
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