Ethical dilemmas

Ethical dilemmas

Ethical dilemmas are prevalent among program evaluators. A case, which would cause me to not work with a nonprofit as an evaluator is when assessing the impact of a program, which sought to provide parent education to parents indicated for child abuse, and finding an incidence of intense child abuse, yet I am required to do nothing because of client confidentiality. Another instance is when programs that have been implemented in various settings have not had a full range of consultations due to limited budgets and timeframes, thus leaving out the views of a community who are now complaining of being left out. Different behaviors have varying meanings in different cultures (Pedersen, Lonner, Draguns, Trimble, & Rio, 2015). This aspect informs my decision that every community should be included and consulted in a program.

Part II

In particular, I support the assertion that randomized controlled trials are unethical because they withhold an intervention from the control group to observe what dissimilarities it makes to contrast the program and no-program groups. This approach is undesirable since it denies participants in the control group the opportunity to benefit from the intervention of a program. For instance, participants in the New York City Justice Corps (NYCJC) program, who received services aimed at enhancing their employability, had a significant improvement in their lives compared to their counterparts in the control group (Bauer et al., 2014). Participants who received the intervention had higher rates of employment after one and two years from the completion as well as an estimated 44% higher wages compared to their counterparts in the control group (Bauer et al., 2014). These outcomes indicate that the use of randomized experiments fuel disparities in society, thus cementing the fact that they are unethical. As such, it is only ethical to conduct a randomized investigation when conducting a pilot program before rolling out a particular intervention in the community where the randomized experiment is conducted.