While participating in a recent training on human subject protection in research, I was struck by one topic that I would not have normally thought of as a thorny ethical dilemma. In our experience, incentives are usually determined by a balance of the resources an organization can give with what we (the researcher and the organization together) believe will encourage people to participate.
A few weeks ago I wrote about evaluating programs designed to solve problems. In the blog I discussed logic models and how they can be used to understand a program, its activities and intended outcomes. Shortly after writing the blog, the U.S. congress began exploring how to define outcomes for the war in Iraq.