Multicultural Evaluation

Multicultural evaluation is evaluation conducted with special attention to racial-ethnic cultures. This special attention can involve one or more of a variety of different aspects surrounding evaluation; these include the context in which evaluation occurs, evaluation planning, stakeholder designation, implementation, design-method selection, measurement selection, reporting, and dissemination. This special attention to racial-ethnic cultures can also vary in degree, from being a central, dominant feature of an evaluation to being a secondary, peripheral feature. In general, evaluations that have the label of multicultural involve racial-ethnic issues in many aspects of the evaluation, and they have racial-ethnic issues as one of the central features of the evaluation.

When evaluation began to be codified as a field and discipline in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, multicultural issues were not central concerns of evaluators. At that time, evaluators generally were White, and they worked in a White culture. As evaluation progressed, ethnic-racial issues began to become more apparent. For example, the area of education was a primary setting for early evaluation work. The U.S. government launched the “Great Society” programs to address, among other issues, disparities in educational opportunities and achievement between Whites and Blacks. Evaluators working in these settings, therefore, began to confront cultural issues to which they had not had to attend before. Other factors were also operating that brought racial-ethnic issues to the forefront in evaluation. One important factor was that U.S. society was focusing more attention on racial-ethnic issues generally. U.S. society was also growing and becoming more multicultural. Evaluators found that they were working with a more diverse group of stakeholders than had been the case earlier. Another factor was the growth of evaluation beyond the U.S. borders, into other cultures where the majority culture was different from the majority culture in the U.S. or where there was a multiplicity of racial-ethnic cultures rather than one dominant culture. Evaluators working in these multiethnic cultures attended to these aspects of the evaluation context, as good evaluators would do in regard to any aspect that had a dominant role in the setting surrounding an evaluation.

In the U.S. culture, another factor was also at work to foster multicultural evaluation: the increase in trained evaluators from non-White cultures. These evaluators were very aware of racial-ethnic issues on many levels and brought this awareness to their evaluation work. These culturally aware evaluators made other evaluators aware that evaluation issues that at first seemed to have no relation to cultural issues could indeed have racial-ethnic aspects and overtones. The growing importance of these viewpoints in the U.S. was demonstrated by the formation of two topical interest groups within the American Evaluation Association: the International and Cross-Cultural TIG in 1990 and the Minority TIG shortly thereafter. These groups and others outside the United States, within both national and local evaluation associations, have continued to focus the evaluation profession on the importance and relevance of cultural issues in evaluation work.

Multicultural evaluation can be the central focus of an evaluation in different ways. One example would be an evaluation in which the project focus and related evaluation questions relate to racial-ethnic cultural differences. In the health area in the United States, for instance, there are significant disparities in health-related outcomes among different racial-ethnic groups, with racial-ethnic groups generally having worse outcomes than Whites. Some programs established to address and reduce these differences focus on interventions in different racial-ethnic cultural groups. Evaluations of these programs have multicultural questions at their core, such as, “Does the program to increase breast screening for cancer result in the same change among women who are Chinese, Korean, and Hispanic?” Multicultural issues will also infuse other aspects of the evaluation, such as the need to include women from these cultures in planning, implementing, and interpreting the results from the evaluation. The evaluation team will probably need to include Chinese-speaking, Korean-speaking, and Spanish-speaking staff members and have a high level of sensitivity to these cultures among all staff.

...