Evaluation Ethics

Evaluation Ethics

Evaluation ethics refers to the principles and standards that guide the conduct of evaluations to ensure they are fair, respectful, and responsible. These ethics focus on protecting participants, maintaining integrity, and producing credible findings. 

Evaluation ethics encompass values such as: 

Respect for Participants: Safeguarding privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. 

Integrity and Honesty: Reporting findings truthfully without bias or manipulation. 

Fairness and Equity: Ensuring evaluations do not disadvantage or harm any group. 

Accountability: Being transparent about methods, limitations, and potential conflicts of interest. 

Why ethical evaluations are important:

Ethical evaluations build confidence in results and recommendations. 

They prevent harm and uphold the dignity of participants, especially vulnerable groups. 

They strengthen partnerships by demonstrating professionalism and responsibility. 

They support compliance with legal and institutional standards. 

Reporting on your results

Evaluation focuses on assessing the effectiveness of a specific program or intervention, while research aims to generate new knowledge and contribute to the academic discourse. If you would like to go beyond evaluation and internal reporting of your results, you may need to seek an 'ethics approval' to share these results or insights more broadly. 

An ethical approach is always needed when undertaking evaluation activities, however formal approval for evaluation by a Human Research Ethics Committee is only needed when: 

• our evaluation will potentially infringe the privacy or professional reputation of participants, providers or organisations

• we will use existing data or analysis that had been collected or carried out for another purpose

• we will gather information about participants beyond that which is collected routinely

• we will compare cohorts of people

• we will use randomisation or control groups

• we will analyse data involving a minority or vulnerable groups, and that group’s data is to be separated out and analysed separately

• our findings will be published. 

Each university will have their own Human Research Ethics Committee. You need to be a staff member at that university to apply for HREC Approval. 

The above information is general advice for all Hubs engaging in WP. For those Hubs involved in the Study Hubs In Place (SHIP) Partnership, SHIP has ethics approval at the broad partnerships level. However it is important to note that this approval does not extend to individual community sub-project activities.

There are very few cases where sub-projects have needed or wanted to apply for ethics approval, but every partnership and project has different needs. We are simply sharing this information to make you aware of what the process is and how it can be pursued! You can reach out to the SHIP Project Team for specific advice on ethics approval fpr your SHIP sub-project. 

Ethical data management and reporting for SHIP sub-projects

Below are two resources to help provide more information on planning ethical evaluation and reporting.