Evaluation In Counseling: Methods, Importance And Ethical Considerations

1. When should monitoring and evaluation occur?

2. What should be done with evaluation findings?

Methods of evaluating progress in counseling

Evaluation is an important part of any process. It helps one determine how successful or unsuccessful they are in a certain program. In the helping process, evaluation of the client’s progress at every stage is essential. Different methods can be used to assess the progress of McLeod family. The most suitable methods to evaluate his family’s progress are direct observation, goal attainment scaling and client self-report. Evaluating the progress through direct observation is quite reliable during the helping sections. The counselor should be able to tell how effective the techniques he/she is using when the client is expressing himself/herself.  If the progress is positive the attitude and the facial expressions when talking about something will be good. Goal attainment scaling method assesses the results against the goals set at the beginning of the process. It enables both the client and the counselor to determine the goals they have achieved and what needs to be done in order to improve and get the best from the entire process. When evaluating the progress of a helping process, the report of the client cannot be ignored. It is only the client who can give a reliable feedback on the reality of matters of concern. The report from the client can be utilized by the counselor to formulate the best ways to get the best results within the desired timeframe (Jones, Sander, & Booker, 2013).  excellent

Monitoring and evaluation are two most important aspects of effective guidance in the counseling process.  It should be done from the beginning of the intervention to the end of the process. Monitoring gives both the client and the counselor the opportunity to discuss what is working well and the areas they need to give more attention or do some adjustments in order to get positive results. It is necessary for the client and the counselor to remain flexible to make adjustment because the continuous assessment and monitoring may identify new needs of the client hence the objective must also be changed (Lahey, & Nielsen, 2013.  

The evaluation findings are very essential in planning for continuous development as well as facilitating service delivery improvements. The findings should be used to create an action plan indicating the things that need to be done, the timeframe to complete them and the people to do them. The findings should also be reviewed to consider explanations, alternatives, various options and their possible effects before they are implemented. The evaluation findings should get the stakeholders involved in discussing and making decision about any necessary improvements.  Additionally, the findings can be used to compare other programs and determine both long-term and short-term improvements. 

The importance of evaluation findings

Ethical issues are quite critical and important especially when evaluating the possibility of either a business or a program thriving in a certain area or field. Carrying out an evaluation or getting feedback from a restricted group driven by self-interest is unethical. It is wrong for a manger to justify additional funding or establishment of a new program through dubious methods, if its goals, objectives and its real potential are not clearly set out(?yigün, 2015). Evaluating the possibility of a program doing well is very necessary since it helps the stakeholders to set SMART goals and objectives as well as allocate enough resources required to run the program. Ethics are violated if the evaluation is biased either by the manager or any other individual for different motives rather than the real intention for establishing the program. Manipulating an evaluation for self-interest create loopholes for any program to fail in achieving its objectives at the desired timeframe. Taking a random data from people is likely to give u a better picture of how something should be done for good planning. It is simply unethical to collect information from people you know will only give positive feedback about a program. If the program is not likely to work the funds can be utilized to run other programs that are already underway (Jeanes, 2017).

It is important to note that although evaluation and monitoring were designed to help organizations improve their services and programs, the two can be used for other different purposes. Determining whether an evaluation is ethical or not depends on how it is done and the motives of doing it. An evaluation may be done for example to justify the decisions of the management to discontinue a program. If the managers are open minded to change their decision based the results of the evaluation, then it can be said to be ethical(Brewis, 2014). Such an evaluation must be objective, fair and designed to either confirm or not confirm the already existing impressions concerning a program. If the evaluation is staged, manipulated and biased in order to justify the management decision to discontinue the streaming, then it is considered unethical. Although Managers have an obligation to protect the best interest of an organization, they should use the right channel. For example, they can make decision based on an annual performance report or use an unbiased evaluation. Further, it is worth noting that the evaluation is best utilized if it is used to improve the program rather than terminating it (Greenwood, 2016).

The role of monitoring in counseling

The world is in a critical time when almost everybody is aware of the ethical issues to be observed by all organizations and people can do everything to ensure these ethics are not violated. One of the ethical issues is treating all people equally regardless of their religion, race or color. Conducting an evaluation to know the truth about the discriminatory claims from one of the clients is quite an important thing. However, deciding whether the evaluation is ethical or not depends on the purpose of doing the evaluation and the manner in which it is done, (Grunig, 2013).If the manager wants the evaluation to be done in order to protect the company from negative publicity and then do nothing about the client’s complaints, then the evaluation is not ethical. It is simply wrong to initiate an evaluation process in order to give it as an excuse and defend the organization from the public criticism when the media calls. Such evaluation is done to protect personal interest of an individual and therefore does not follow the ethics guidelines. If the evaluation is done in good faith and objectively to correct the practice in question even after the media has forgotten about the issue, then the evaluation is ethical (Ferrero, & Sison, 2014).

The need of counseling services in our today’s society is ever increasing with the different needs of big population. Evaluating the results of the process is quite important. If the process is done in the right manner the clients are ready for evaluation at the end.  The evaluation of the helping process has three key areas to look at; the outcomes, the process and the satisfactionof the client. Ethics in the field of counseling demands that the process must be personal and a secret between the client and the counselor helping him/her. Although it is right for companies offering such services to evaluate the satisfaction of their clients, it is unethical to seek some information that may implicate the confidentiality of the entire process (Kocet, & Herlihy, 2014). The client should only give their opinion about the environment in which the service was offered, say if the goals were met or not and suggest whether they can refer friends to the facility or not. Additionally, it is not wrong for them to give general information such as age and gender. However, disclosing the name of the counselor they have been seeing is unethical since it may break the confidence, they had created about the Whole matter being a secret and therefore discourage them from seeking help when another need arises (Coll, Doumas, Trotter, & Freeman, 2013).   

References

Brewis, J. (2014). The ethics of researching friends: On convenience sampling in qualitative management and organization studies. British Journal of Management, 25(4), 849-862.

Coll, K. M., Doumas, D. M., Trotter, A., & Freeman, B. J. (2013). Developing the counselor as a person and as a professional: Attitudinal changes in core counseling courses. The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, 52(1), 54-66.

Ferrero, I., & Sison, A. J. G. (2014). A quantitative analysis of authors, schools and themes in virtue ethics articles in business ethics and management journals (1980–2011). Business Ethics: A European Review, 23(4), 375-400.

Greenwood, M. (2016). Approving or improving research ethics in management journals. Journal of Business Ethics, 137(3), 507-520.

Grunig, J. E. (2013). Furnishing the Edi?ce: Ongoing Research on Public Relations as a Strategic Management Function. In Public Relations and Communication Management (pp. 41-66). Routledge.

Jeanes, E. (2017). Are we ethical? Approaches to ethics in management and organisation research. Organization, 24(2), 174-197.

Jones, J. M., Sander, J. B., & Booker, K. W. (2013). Multicultural competency building: Practical solutions for training and evaluating student progress. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 7(1), 12.

Kocet, M. M., & Herlihy, B. J. (2014). Addressing value?based conflicts within the counseling relationship: A decision?making model. Journal of Counseling & Development, 92(2), 180-186.

Lahey, R., & Nielsen, S. B. (2013). Rethinking the relationship among monitoring, evaluation, and results?based management: Observations from Canada. New Directions for Evaluation, 2013(137), 45-56.

?yigün, N. Ö. (2015). Corporate social responsibility and ethics in management in light of sustainable development. In Handbook of research on developing sustainable value in economics, finance, and marketing (pp. 239-258). IGI Global.