Lee, K., & Csuti, N. B. (2009). The journey continues: Ensuring a cross-culturally competent evaluation.

Introduction

In 2007, The Colorado Trust published and disseminated the report, The Importance of Culture in Evaluation, a guide for evaluators who are beginning to develop their capacity to work across cultures. The report focuses on three characteristics that influence interactions among people – culture, social identity or group membership, and privilege and power – and as such, affect the evaluation process, from design to the reporting of findings.

Following the dissemination of the report, The Colorado Trust convened a group of evaluators in Colorado to discuss the report and potential next steps. During the discussion, some participating evaluators and foundation staff expressed a need for more practical examples of how cross-cultural issues surface in evaluation, and how to address the issues. Their request became the impetus for this report, designed to be a companion piece to the first report, The Importance of Culture in Evaluation.

for discussions with numerous professional evaluators at the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference in 2008. In addition, some evaluators and other professionals with extensive experiences in similar cross-cultural situations were asked to provide feedback. The discussions, held over a period of several months, resulted in this report.

This report begins with the themes that emerged from the commentaries provided by the evaluators and other professionals regarding the types of changes necessary to make the evaluations in all four case studies more cross-culturally competent. The themes are followed by the four case studies and their respective expert commentaries. This report does not elaborate on what evaluators could specifically do to make these changes; such explicit suggestions are covered in the companion piece The Importance of Culture in Evaluation.

This report contributes to the growing effort among evaluators to uncover and ground sensible practices that can be applied to improve evaluation in culturally diverse settings. The importance of understanding the nuances of different cultural groups in our diverse nation is critical for informing program design and policy development. We hope that this report contributes to a step in this direction.