http://aje.sagepub.comAmerican Journal of Evaluation

DOI: 10.1177/1098214007306378 2007; 28; 318 American Journal of Evaluation

Leslie J. Cooksy Ethical Challenges Scenario: Youth Involvement in Evaluation

http://aje.sagepub.com The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: American Evaluation Association

can be found at:American Journal of Evaluation Additional services and information for

http://aje.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:

http://aje.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://aje.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/28/3/318 Citations

by kimbao bao on April 13, 2009 http://aje.sagepub.comDownloaded from

318

American Journal of Evaluation, Vol. 28 No. 3, September 2007 318-320DOI: 10.1177/1098214007306378 2007 American Evaluation Association

Ethical Challenges

All evaluators face the challenge of striving to adhere to the highest possiblestandards of ethical conduct. Translating the AEAs Guiding Principles andthe Joint Committees Program Evaluation Standards into everyday practice,however, can be a complex, uncertain, and frustrating endeavor. Moreover,acting in an ethical fashion can require considerable risk-taking on theevaluators part. In the Ethical Challenges column, commentators share theirviews of how evaluators might respond to specific problematic situations,linking their analyses to the principles and standards they believe are mostrelevant to the case. Not surprisingly, the perspectives that commentators offerare not always in agreement. When this occurs, reflection on the nature andsources of these differences of opinion can enhance our sensitivity to theethical dimensions of our evaluation work and our awareness of the optionsavailable for addressing them.Readers who wish to submit cases to Ethical Challenges, or serve as commenta-tors, should contact Leslie J. Cooksy, section editor, at ljcooksy@udel.edu.

When an inexperienced evaluator takes on an approach to evaluation that he or she is notqualified to carry out, ethical challenges can emerge. In this issues scenario, YouthInvolvement in Evaluation, an evaluator interested in youth empowerment plans to evaluatea middle school program using youth as partners in the evaluation. This approach is consis-tent with evaluation models that embrace fairness, inclusion, and empowerment (e.g.,Fetterman, 2005; House, 2005; King, 2005; Lincoln, 2005), but it requires skills in negotia-tion and youth leadership. In the scenario, the evaluator is not prepared when the youthexpress their sense of empowerment in ways that displease their teachers.

The two commentaries on the scenario are written by experts in youth programs andyouth-led inquiry. The first commentary, Youth Empowerment: Learning Voice, is writtenby Kathrin Walker, research fellow and project director in the Center for 4-H & CommunityYouth Development at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Walker has examined youth empow-erment primarily through the lens of the adult leaders of youth programs. Drawing on herresearch on the practice dilemmas of youth program leaders, her commentary considers howthe evaluator in the scenario could more productively work with the youth and adults. Thesecond commentary, The Context of Power: Young People as Evaluators, is coauthored byJennifer Gong, the executive director of Youth In Focus (YIF), a nonprofit training and con-sulting organization that supports youth-led action research, evaluation, and planning, and byDana Wright, senior program manager of YIFs Education Justice Initiative. (The EducationalJustice Initiative uses youth-led inquiry as a way for youth to have a voice in public educationpolicy and program decisions.) Gong and Wright bring their extensive experience facilitatingyouth-led inquiry to their response to the scenario.

Reflecting the authors areas of expertise, the two responses have different orientations.Walker, with her knowledge of the issues faced by leaders of youth programs, raises questionsabout adult and organizational readiness for a youth-empowerment evaluation. She also

by kimbao bao on April 13, 2009 http://aje.sagepub.comDownloaded from

319 American Journal of Evaluation / September 2007

identifies different degrees of youth involvement, suggesting that the appropriate degree willvary depending on the extent to which the evaluation has a youth-empowerment intent. Gongand Wright, on the other hand, discuss adultism, which they liken to racism and sexism, as amajor barrier to successful youth involvement in evaluation. Their comments include theways that adultism may have manifested itself in the evaluators actions.

Despite their different orientations, the commentaries have some similar themes. Bothdescribe the value of including youth in evaluation, connecting their inclusion to the GuidingPrinciples of respect for people and responsibilities for general and public welfare. Both alsonote the relevance of the Guiding Principle of competencenot only evaluator expertise inthe effective implementation of an evaluation with a youth-empowerment dimension but alsocultural competence, recognizing youth as having a culture distinct from that of adults. Bothcommentaries make similar recommendations for working with the adults and youth in thescenario to resolve the problem. Finally, by drawing their recommendations from researchoutside the field of evaluation, both commentaries provide an important reminder of how ourevaluation skills can be deepened when we partner with subject-matter experts (specifically,for the scenario, experts in youth program leadership and youth empowerment).

Leslie J. Cooksy

Ethical Challenges ScenarioYouth Involvement in Evaluation

In her first postdoctoral evaluation project, Assistant Professor Luanda was hired by thelocal school district to evaluate a middle school pilot program, Focus On Our Learning(FOOL). FOOL was intended to make learning more engaging for students by increasingthe variety of instructional modalities employed by the teachers and helping teacherscreate linkages across subjects. In keeping with FOOLs goal of engaging students in learning,Dr. Luanda decided to include a youth-empowerment dimension in the evaluation. Aftergetting the approval of her universitys institutional review board, she met with the princi-pal of the school, the parentteacher organization, and the teachers who were participatingin FOOL to explain the approach. With their input, she decided to limit participation in theyouth-empowerment evaluation activities to the eighth-grade students and to specificallydraw from the students in one of the eighth-grade FOOL social studies classes. She made apresentation to the students, stressing that the project would involve work outside of class,including after-school meetings and keeping a diary. She also described the fun and impor-tance of some of the evaluation activities, such as interviewing their classmates. She wouldwork with them to analyze and organize the interview data to develop a report about studentexperiences in FOOL. As arranged with the teacher, she added that all studentseven thosewho did not participate in the evaluationwould learn about social science research methodsin their social studies class.

After this presentation, Dr. Luanda gave each student an informational packet withinformed consent forms for both the student and his or her parent or guardian. By the end ofthe following week, the deadline for signing up, five students had volunteered and had returnedsigned consent forms from their parents or guardians. Although she had hoped for more,Dr. Luanda felt that five students was enough to go forward with the youth-empowerment partof the evaluation.

by kimbao bao on April 13, 2009 http://aje.sagepub.comDownloaded from

At their first weekly meeting, Dr. Luanda gave an overview of the evaluation and describedthe role that she envisioned for the students. She then facilitated a discussion of evaluationquestions that the students could address and suggested some ways for them to decide onwhich questions they should focus. The second meeting was dedicated to thinking aboutdifferent kinds of data-collection methods and developing interview questions. There was alot of joking around, but eventually the youth evaluators agreed to a set of questions. Afterthat, their weekly meetings focused on reviewing and organizing data collected the previousweek and discussing the themes that were emerging from the diaries and interviews.

About 4 weeks into the process, just when Dr. Luanda started to think that she had set upa project for the students that was truly empowering, two of the teachers complained to herthat the students in her group were disrupting class by talking back to them and criticizingtheir teaching. Dr. Luanda was not sure what to do and was especially unsure how to balanceher responsibilities to the youth evaluators, the other students in the program, the teachers,and the school district.

References

Fetterman, D. M. (2005). Empowerment evaluation. In S. Mathison (Ed.), Encyclopedia of evaluation (pp. 125-129).Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

House, E. R. (2005). Deliberative democratic evaluation. In S. Mathison (Ed.), Encyclopedia of evaluation (pp. 104-108). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

King, J. A. (2005). Participatory evaluation. In S. Mathison (Ed.), Encyclopedia of evaluation (pp. 291-294).Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Fourth-generation evaluation. In S. Mathison (Ed.), Encyclopedia of evaluation (pp. 69-78).Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Ethical Challenges 320

by kimbao bao on April 13, 2009 http://aje.sagepub.comDownloaded from

/ColorImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorImageDict > /AntiAliasGrayImages false /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict > /GrayImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayImageDict > /AntiAliasMonoImages false /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict > /AllowPSXObjects false /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox false /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName (http://www.color.org) /PDFXTrapped /Unknown

/DetectCurves 0.100000 /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveFlatness true /CropColorImages true /ColorImageMinResolution 150 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /CropGrayImages true /GrayImageMinResolution 150 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /CropMonoImages true /MonoImageMinResolution 1200 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /SyntheticBoldness 1.000000 /Description >>> setdistillerparams> setpagedevice