04/14/10 – The Journey Continues: Ensuring a Cross-Culturally Competent Evaluation
by Nancy CsutiDirector of Research, Evaluation & Strategic Learning, The Colorado Trust
As Colorado's racial and ethnic populations have grown more diverse, we have worked to incorporate culturally competent practices into our grantmaking. This includes providing new research and information on evolving practices to our grantees and partners. A new report from The Colorado Trust is designed to help evaluators better understand and apply sensible practices to improve evaluation in culturally diverse settings.
Developed by Community Science, The Journey Continues: Ensuring a Cross-Culturally Competent Evaluation shows how cross-cultural issues surface in evaluation, and how to address the issues. The report builds on The Trust's earlier report, The Importance of Culture in Evaluation.
For evaluators less experienced in working with different cultural communities, the nuances that require attention may not be obvious. Through four case studies, this new report explores an array of challenges and offers suggestions. For example, evaluators need to consider whether the implications of evaluation findings could be used to benefit or harm a particular group of people. They should also take into consideration the history of the people who are affected by the evaluation, as well as being attuned to the current context within which the evaluation is operating. Without sufficient understanding of these types of nuances, evaluators may identify the wrong informants, misinterpret data or unintentionally cause harm.
On the other hand, it is impossible for any evaluator – or any one person – to know the nuances of every cultural group. It's more feasible for evaluators to develop the ability not to make assumptions about any group of people and to know what questions to ask before conducting any evaluative work.
While such skills may take a lifetime to acquire, one important step along this path is taking in the type of information offered by Dr. Kien Lee and her associates at Community Science through these reports.
For more information, contact Nancy Csuti, DrPH.
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