How do Evaluators Communicate Cultural Competence? Indications of Cultural Competence through an Examination of the American Evaluation Association’s Career Center

Abstract

Background: Cultural competency is an important but under-adopted skill among professional evaluators. Yet in the transactions around job seeking and hiring in evaluation, cultural competency is a practical and common concept. How cultural competency gets communicated in those transactions may provide insights for the field.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to identify ways job seekers and employers discuss cultural competency in order to move toward a more widely accepted way of operationalizing the concept.

Setting: The American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) Career Center Webpage.

Intervention: Not applicable.

Research Design: A nonexperimental design was used in the study.

Data Collection and Analysis: Document review was the main form of data collection, where resumes and job postings on AEA’s webpage were systematically collected. They were then rated by the two study authors on cultural competency and interrater reliabilities were calculated. Content analysis was also used to identify themes in ways through which cultural competency is expressed or communicated in the documents.

Findings: Indicators of cultural competency are identified, in the context of employment seeking. The study also highlights the conditions which may have contributed to low interrater reliabilities and a larger need to develop a practical, operationalized definition of cultural competency, despite inherent flaws.

Keywords: cultural competency; evaluator competencies