Assessing Respect for Human Dignity in Programs: Demonstration of Tools

Abstract Information: Human dignity is a central theme of global development work and is an oft-cited concept in the mission, vision, or guiding principles of a wide variety of development and humanitarian organizations. Despite this commitment, there exists a noticeable lack of frameworks to operationalize human dignity in practice and a relative lack of cross-culturally validated measures to assess and evaluate respect for dignity. This session will describe a project that is seeking to understand how respect for human dignity manifests across sectors and traditions and will introduce two measures of respect for dignity that have been developed and validated for use in program evaluations. With support from GHR Foundation, Catholic Relief Services has partnered with the University of Notre Dame on this project. Cross-discipline and cross-cultural empirical studies of the concept of human dignity in the scientific literature were reviewed to extract the observed dimensions of respect for human dignity. This literature review served as the foundation to develop, pilot, and validate a pair of evaluation tools that can be used across programming sectors: Project Respect for Participant Dignity Scale measures the extent to which project activities respect the dignity of participants. Respect for Dignity in Daily Life Index measures the respect for dignity that participants receive in their households, communities and institutions. In addition to advancing understanding of the role human dignity plays in development, the measures are also intended to encourage projects to explicitly consider and incorporate dignity-related aspects of interventions into program design. The tools were validated through a formal psychometric study and analysis in four low and middle-income countries, exhibiting suitable face, content, and construct validity. This demonstration session will introduce participants to the two Respect for Dignity tools, the dimensions they cover, and how the tools can be applied in program evaluation. The demonstration will also encourage participants to provide feedback on the tools and related guidance.