Michael Morris

Education

Ph.D. - Community-Social Psychology - Boston College

Published Books and Articles

Most recent:

Morris, M. (2008). Evaluation Ethics for Best Practice: Cases and Commentaries.  New York: Guilford Press.

Morris, M. (2007).  Foundation officers, evaluation, and ethical problems: A pilot investigation.  Evaluation and Program Planning, 30, pp. 410-415.

Courses Taught

P 619 Organizational Behavior

P 605 Survey of Community Psychology

P 610 Program Evaluation

P 612 Consultation  

Other

Michael Morris has been a faculty member at the University of New Haven (UNH) since 1978, where he serves as Professor and Director of the Master's Program in Community Psychology . Michael also consults part-time with a variety of human-service, non-profit, and public-sector organizations; his consulting specialties are organizational development and the enhancement of collaborative relationships between organizations.

The professional activity Michael enjoys most is teaching, in large part because at UNH he has the opportunity to teach the subjects he finds most interesting and challenging: organizational behavior, consultation, community psychology, and program evaluation. These areas relate directly to the professional work Michael does outside of UNH. Michael has received the University's Award for Excellence in Teaching on two occasions (1985 and 2008); this is the professional accomplishment of which he is most proud.  

Michael's major research interest is the ethical challenges faced by program evaluators in their work. In 1993 he published the first national study of such challenges among professional evaluators, a task that required more content analysis of survey data by Michael and his graduate assistant (a co-author of the study) than any two people should have to conduct in a lifetime. This study is frequently cited in publications dealing with ethical issues in evaluation. Michael has served as Editor of the Ethical Challenges section in the American Journal of Evaluation, as Chair of both the Ethics Committee and the Public Affairs Committee of the American Evaluation Association, and as a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Directions for Evaluation and the American Journal of Evaluation.  His third book, entitled Evaluation Ethics for Best Practice: Cases and Commentaries in Evaluation Ethics, was  published in October 2007 by Guilford Press.

Feel free to read no further if you abhor the "personal tidbits" section of these descriptions. Michael enjoys playing racquetball (when he plays well), movies (when they're good), writing humorous essays (see Grin, his blog), performing stand-up comedy (when other people find him funny), and reading long novels (when he has the time). He loves living in New Haven because it has magnificent pizza, world-class theatre, it gets less snow than Boston, and it provides convenient TV and radio access to three Major League baseball teams.