Thank you for sharing your evaluation plans for Harbor Haven Community Services — a vital organization serving a vulnerable population. Your post offers a thoughtful overview of the complex ethical landscape involved in consulting for a social service agency working with individuals experiencing homelessness, mental illness, and substance use disorders. I particularly appreciated your emphasis on informed consent, confidentiality, and cultural competence, essential to ethical and practical program evaluation in this setting. I wanted to highlight the importance of trauma-informed care (TIC) principles in program evaluations for agencies like Harbor Haven. Many individuals experiencing homelessness have histories of trauma, and evaluators can unintentionally retraumatize clients through poorly designed assessments or insensitive data collection methods (Gilmoor et al., 2020). A study by Berring et al. (2024) emphasized that incorporating trauma-informed principles, like creating emotionally safe environments and offering choice in participation, improves ethical practice and data quality in services for homeless populations. Have you considered how you might adapt your data collection instruments or procedures to align with trauma-informed evaluation practices?
References
Berring, L. L., Holm, T., Hansen, J. P., Delcomyn, C. L., Søndergaard, R., & Hvidhjelm, J. (2024). Implementing trauma-informed care settings, definitions, interventions, measures, and implementation across settings: A scoping review. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 12(9), 908. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare12090908
Gilmoor, A., Vallath, S., Regeer, B., & Bunders, J. (2020). “If somebody could just understand what I am going through, it would make all the difference”: Conceptualizations of trauma in homeless populations experiencing severe mental illness. Transcultural Psychiatry, 57(3), 455–467. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461520909613
