Ethics

At a general level, the domain of ethics deals with issues of moral duty and obligation, involving actions that are subject to being judged as good or bad, right or wrong. It is not surprising that the nature of evaluation generates many circumstances in which practitioners, in the course of their work, can encounter challenges, conflicts, or dilemmas that are deemed to be ethical. As is the case in other professions, various groups of evaluators have developed standards and guidelines to provide guidance to practitioners in preventing or coping with ethical problems. The Program Evaluation Standards and the Guiding Principles for Evaluators are the two most well known of these efforts.