Managing conflict of interests in setting participative evaluation research

This presentation is part of the workshop: "Addressing Conflicts of Interest in Social Work Research. It will focus on ethical considerations regarding the first steps of social work researches involving users, in particular the issue of the choice and selection of people involved in evaluation participative research. Involving users in social work research is a quite new practice in the Italian context and is somewhat increasing. However is still rare that users are involved in evaluative research of child protection services. Researchers (and professionals) are worried that the complex relation that parents have with the professionals negatively affects their ability to give their opinion easily and without any secondary purposes. They may also be concerned about the weakness of some users and are willing to protect from excessively demanding experiences. Hence, in order to build a feasible context the researcher makes a selection of participants that can lead to discriminate some users than others. Is the need of creating a feasible context and the will of protecting users an acceptable reason to exclude some subjects from the research? The issues is relevant both on the methodological and the ethical side: the first is broadly related to the accountability of results, while the second queries the researchers about who will be excluded and who will be discriminated in their possibilities of taking voice. These issues will be explored referring to a participative evaluation research conducted by the author and will provide some traces for the discussion on managing conflict of interest proposed in the workshop.