Thank you for your previous suggestions for solving the problem of participants’ attrition. I wonder if it is ethical for evaluators to use financial compensation to retain participants in the prison context.

Pleasure.

Many thanks for the reply.

Given the precarious situation in which most find themselves when leaving prison, the compensation meets a real need in the population being evaluated and may, among other things, cover expenses of traveling to the meeting place and related costs. Some scholars also believe that financial compensation, however modest, is unavoidable when dealing with a criminal population for whom giving something without expecting anything in return is unusual. On the other hand, some inmates said that they were satisfied simply with helping other inmates and thus making their “time” in detention profitable. Some also chose to donate their compensation to charity. For some cases in America, financial compensation of $40 paid at the last stage of data collection to participants who were no longer imprisoned was one of the means used to maintain motivation to participate.