Chapter 3: Through a Cultural Lens: Reflections on Validity and Theory in Evaluation

Cultural diversity has become a critical issue for program evaluation in the United States due to population demographics in general and to the nature of the target populations of many educational and social programs in particular. Marked differences among the personal characteristics, backgrounds, and belief systems of the consumers of human service programs, the providers of human service programs, and the evaluators of human service programs make understanding the impact of culture a priority concern. Culture impacts all aspects of evaluation—from the formation of evaluation questions to the selection of data sources; from data gathering methods and data analysis techniques to strategies for communicating findings. As with all knowledge, evaluative understandings and judgments are culturally contextualized. To establish the validity of such understandings and judgments, cultural diversity must be explicitly addressed. Appreciations of diverse cultural perspectives strengthen validity; they must be expanded and deepened. Biases embedded in cultural diversity threaten validity; they must be exposed and interrupted (Fine & Powell, 1997).