Ethics in program evaluation

As is the general practice, the evaluation of social, work is fitted with ethical structures, some of them encoded, most of them implicit in the activities, rationales, and compassions of the profession. It is useful to have multiple codes, expressing ethical concern from different perspectives, for each reaches into different shadows. Ethical behavior is not so much a matter of following principles as of balancing competing principles. Realization and resolution of ethical conflict come largely from within the individual social worker and evaluator. We describe three program evaluation situations to illustrate these points.