Ethics: Informed Consent from Program Participants

Ethics: Informed Consent from Program Participants

Note that if you plan to include in your evaluation, the focus and reporting on personal information about customers or clients participating in the evaluation, then you should first gain their consent to do so. They should understand what you're doing with them in the evaluation and how any information associated with them will be reported. You should clearly convey terms of confidentiality regarding access to evaluation results. They should have the right to participate or not. Have participants review and sign an informed consent form. See the sample informed-consent form.

How to Apply Certain Methods

Purposes and Formats of Questions Developing Questionnaires
Conducting Interviews
Conducting Focus Groups
Developing Case Studies

Selecting Which Methods to Use

Overall Goal in Selecting Methods:

The overall goal in selecting evaluation method(s) is to get the most useful information to key decision makers in the most cost-effective and realistic fashion. Consider the following questions:
1. What information is needed to make current decisions about a product or program?
2. Of this information, how much can be collected and analyzed in a low-cost and practical manner, e.g., using questionnaires, surveys and checklists?
3. How accurate will the information be (reference the above table for disadvantages of methods)?
4. Will the methods get all of the needed information?
5. What additional methods should and could be used if additional information is needed?
6. Will the information appear as credible to decision makers, e.g., to funders or top management?
7. Will the nature of the audience conform to the methods, e.g., will they fill out questionnaires carefully, engage in interviews or focus groups, let you examine their documentations, etc.?
8. Who can administer the methods now or is training required?
9. How can the information be analyzed?

Note that, ideally, the evaluator uses a combination of methods, for example, a questionnaire to quickly collect a great deal of information from a lot of people, and then interviews to get more in-depth information from certain respondents to the questionnaires. Perhaps case studies could then be used for more in-depth analysis of unique and notable cases, e.g., those who benefited or not from the program, those who quit the program, etc.

Four Levels of Evaluation:

There are four levels of evaluation information that can be gathered from clients, including getting their:
1. reactions and feelings (feelings are often poor indicators that your service made lasting impact)
2. learning (enhanced attitudes, perceptions or knowledge)
3. changes in skills (applied the learning to enhance behaviors)
4. effectiveness (improved performance because of enhanced behaviors)

Usually, the farther your evaluation information gets down the list, the more useful is your evaluation. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to reliably get information about effectiveness. Still, information about learning and skills is quite useful.

Analyzing and Interpreting Information

Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data is often the topic of advanced research and evaluation methods. There are certain basics which can help to make sense of reams of data.

Always start with your evaluation goals:
When analyzing data (whether from questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, or whatever), always start from review of your evaluation goals, i.e., the reason you undertook the evaluation in the first place. This will help you organize your data and focus your analysis. For example, if you wanted to improve your program by identifying its strengths and weaknesses, you can organize data into program strengths, weaknesses and suggestions to improve the program. If you wanted to fully understand how your program works, you could organize data in the chronological order in which clients go through your program. If you are conducting an outcomes-based evaluation, you can categorize data according to the indicators for each outcome.