Hello! My name is Rachel Berkowitz, and I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and Recreation at San José State University. My work focuses on understanding and addressing the ways in which structures, systems, and places create and perpetuate health inequities through applied research and community-based work. I am a proud part of the ‘23-’24 AEA Minority Serving Institution Fellowship cohort, and in this post, I will reflect on ethics in relation to culturally responsive and equitable evaluation (CREE).
Lessons Learned
Ethics are about what it means to do right – the principles that guide how we move through the world and our work in ways that are moral, fair, and good. We start developing our personal ethics as young children, judging and making decisions about what is right and what is wrong based on the cultures we have been exposed to so far in life. I remember as a 5-year-old having a chance to judge my Kindergarten class’s Halloween costume contest (The prize? Giant pixie sticks. Much coveted) and thinking to myself, “I cannot just give this candy to my friends. I need to really think about who has the best costume; otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair.” In this high-stakes (for a 5-year-old) situation, my developing brain was trying to figure out how to do right.
As we grow and our worlds expand, so too do our ethical teachers and the cultures which created them. We encounter professional ethics which describe what “doing right” looks like in our work. Every workplace has its own guiding ethics; even something as simple as “all employees must wash their hands before returning to work” illuminates an ethical principle. Because professional ethics are based on the cultures which created them (which may or may not be the same cultures that influence our personal ethics), we may encounter a clash. This is something my students and I have grappled with in class and in our work– what do you do when there is this difference between my personal and professional ethics when designing and implementing evaluations? To me, navigating such ethical dilemmas in evaluation has to start with seeking to understand the cultures which drive the ethics, as exemplified through CREE.
CREE is an approach to evaluation which “incorporates cultural, structural, and contextual factors (e.g., historical, social, economic, racial, ethnic, gender) using a participatory process that shifts power to individuals most impacted.” CREE has an embedded philosophy for how to do right (SLP4i’s 7 key principles for culturally responsive and equity-focused evaluations capture this ethical code). Fundamentally, CREE’s guiding principles of “how to do right” emphasize the need to understand and grapple with the historical, contextual, and cultural realities which each stakeholder brings to the table – personally AND professionally – and to ensure that all aspects of the work moves us closer to a more just and equitable reality. The CREE approach forces us to reflect on \our own cultural influences and role in relation to inequities alongside that of other stakeholders, and to have each step of our evaluation work be motivated by that grappling. Ultimately, CREE asks us to make explicit what is often implicit. Only through such transparency can the collective working on an evaluation clarify and define the ethics which guide our work together, drawing from the diversity of cultures present. And to me, this is a necessary precursor to navigating ethical dilemmas and ultimately forming and maintaining the effective and equitable collaborations that are vital for authentic and useful evaluation.
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