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Different Strokes for Different Folks: Designing a Culturally Grounded Implementation Evaluation of Grantees Serving a Diverse Minority
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| Presenter(s):
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| Luis R Torres, University of Houston, lrtorres@uh.edu
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| Karen Gardiner, The Lewin Group, karen.gardiner@lewin.com
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| Luis H Zayas, Washington University in St Louis, lzayas@wustl.edu
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| Allison Hyra, The Lewin Group, allison.hyra@lewin.com
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| Cara Kundrat, The Lewin Group, cara.kundrat@lewin.com
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| Whitney Engstrom, The Lewin Group, whitney.engstrom@lewin.com
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| Abstract:
As the largest minority and fastest-growing group in the U.S., Hispanics are an important group for service delivery. Their great diversity is an important consideration when designing plans to evaluate those services in a culturally grounded manner. The federally funded Hispanic Healthy Marriage Initiative Grantee Implementation Evaluation seeks to identify the unique cultural, linguistic, demographic, and other factors that need to be considered in designing and successfully delivering family strengthening services to Hispanic families. This paper outlines the process undertaken by a diverse group of evaluators to develop a culturally grounded evaluation aimed at documenting various programmatic approaches to improve Hispanic family well-being through healthy marriage and relationship education programs. Program evaluations that are responsive to contextual and cultural specificity are still fairly novel and emergent (Chouinard & Cousins, 2009). Our paper makes an important contribution to the emerging field of culturally grounded evaluation.
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Issues in Evaluating Service Delivery to Migrant Farm Workers With Disabilities
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| Presenter(s):
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| Karen Cinnamond, Human Development Institute, kecinn2@email.uky.edu
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| Joanne Farley, Human Development Institute, joanne.farley@uky.edu
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| Abstract:
As AEA and its members increasingly recognize, “quality” in evaluation practice requires that that practice be culturally competent as well as other things. While the organization is still working toward a cultural competence statement, evaluators continue to work with issues of cultural competence as they evaluate programs involving cultural diversity. This paper will focus on issues involved in evaluators being culturally competent in recognizing the need for and developing an in-depth understanding of how Hispanic migrant workers and their families interpret what it means to have disabilities and how disabilities figure in their self-, familial and social understandings of identity. It will also discuss how needs related to addressing disabilities are identified within the landscapes of this group’s life experiences in attempting to maintain a stable and acceptable quality of life. The focal point of discussing these issues will be the effort to evaluate a program serving primarily Hispanic migrant farmworkers with disabilities. Services provided by this program are intended to be those that meet the needs of migrant workers with disabilities in finding stable employment that allows for economic self-sufficiency. While the evaluators embarking on this evaluation were aware that cultural diversity would require development of new understandings and of evaluation methods tailored to the cultural context of the evaluation, they were unprepared for just how dramatic some of the adjustments they needed to make would be. The lessons they have learned in negotiating the communicative and cultural meanings and experiences of this population have been profound and have significance beyond the evaluation of service delivery to Hispanic migrant farmworkers. This paper will provide an in-depth discussion of both the issues and lessons learned which relate to cultural competency which emerged during the evaluation of this program.
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