Ethical Considerations

Ethical considerations were observed in the conduct of the study from the social

welfare agencies (public and private) and the students. The research proposal was

submitted to the Ethics committee of the College of Teachers’ Education for ethical

review. For which after one week, a clearance for implementation was issued. The

following rights of the participants were considered:

1. Voluntary participation of participants was ensured. Their participation in the process

of data gathering was completely voluntary.

2. Informed consent was taken from social workers after letter of request for the data

collection was approved by the respective heads of social welfare agencies and the

college. Participants were fully informed about the procedures that were utilized. Their

consent to participate was secured. The informed consent was attached to the

research instrument and prior to answering the instruments; the respondents were

instructed to read the consent before signing it.

3. There were no known risks experienced by the participants in the conduct of the data

gathering.

4. Confidentiality of information was observed during the conduct of the study such as

the identifying information of the students, names of social welfare agencies, social

welfare agency supervisors and agency heads were not made available and remain

confidential all throughout the study. Identities of the participants were substituted with

false names; social welfare agencies were described according to the nature of their

programs and services and communities were grouped according to districts.

 Further, unethical activities were not done on this study specially failure to

acknowledge the contributions of other people in the field. These include relevant prior

work in the review of related literature and studies.