Introduction

Evaluation judgements for scoping, objective- and inquiry-setting, and delivery are interwoven with ethical dilemmas. These occur for any form of evidence generation and use, but in purposeful evaluation identifying ethical risks and resolving them have a particularly important role to play. Carol Weiss cautioned: ‘Evaluation has an obligation to pay even more attention to ethical questions than most other kinds of social science research’ (Weiss, 1998: 92).

Ethics have attracted considerable interest among academic and other researchers, although with less attention to the enhanced challenges within evaluation. This has generated an extensive international literature and various derived codes of practice- setting principles and competencies for evaluators, including some of the earliest guidance in the ‘professional code’ of the American Evaluation Association. Implementing such guidance in practice can be challenging and Guillemin and Gillam (2004) helpfully separated these into ‘ethical procedures’ (clearance and professional standards) and ‘ethical practice’; this chapter's focus is on the practice. Later, Chapter 13 includes a review of managing ethical procedures.

What is the ethical dimension to evaluation?

For some commissioners and evaluators, especially for medical, health and social welfare interventions, consideration of ethics can be reduced to managing ethical clearance of a methodology. Clearance may also be mandated in other fields by some delivery organisations, notably for university teams, but elsewhere organisational or procedural needs for ethical clearance are patchy. These requirements are considered in more detail later in the book (Chapter 13), but with or without a need for ethical clearance, a lot of judgements need to be made about applying ethical practice in evaluation.