Graduate Students & New Evaluators TIG Week: Evaluating at the Intersections: Culture, Ethics, and Artificial Intelligence by Courtney Stone and Christina Busto

Date: Thursday, August 7, 2025

This week, the members of the Graduate Students and New Evaluators (GSNE) TIG share various tips, tricks, resources, and points of view that can be helpful for students and new evaluators. We hope both evaluators, new and old, will review this material and share the resources and stories with each other.

-Liz Rojas (GSNE, Co-Chair), Christine Liboon (GSNE, Program Chair), and GSNE Leadership Team

We are Courtney Stone, assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and Christina Bustos, doctoral student at the Arizona State University Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. We are early-career evaluators that share research interests surrounding culturally responsive evaluation and the social responsibility of evaluators. 

We have both been trained in a culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) approach, with a majority of Courtney’s evaluation experience occurring within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) contexts and Christina’s evaluation work focusing on community programs. We believe cultural responsiveness to be especially important in these and other contexts, and note the challenges emerging evaluators have in translating CRE from theory to practice. Such difficulties can be exacerbated within the foreseeable proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) in evaluation practice as evaluators navigate the intersections of cultures, ethics, and AI. We will focus on the evaluation of a doula program–established to improve maternal and infant health outcomes–to discuss challenges and opportunities for navigating these intersections. From this context, we learned a few key lessons.

Lessons Learned

1. Cultural Salience – Within the context of the doula program evaluated, there were two key, dynamic cultural entanglements happening at any given time that speak to the unique role of doulas as ‘cultural brokers’ in the healthcare system. The first was Black, brown, and Indigenous families receiving doula services and performing doula work. The second was doula culture, centered around connections to families to support positive and deeply connected birthing experiences. 
2. Alignment of AI Prompts to Values and Audience(s) – Once an evaluation is complete with recommendations, AI can help aid in strengthening those recommendations to enhance program effectiveness. Evaluators should discuss with the client that AI is imperfect and should be prompted to use the program values when providing resources. For example, the evaluator(s) may recommend that program managers develop a curriculum guide, utilizing AI assistance, with resources and activities for monthly training sessions for doulas. The evaluator(s) should work with program managers to clarify the intended audience and make program values and philosophies explicit in the AI prompts to generate resources that are culturally commensurate with the program and the doulas within it. 

Hot Tips

In order to navigate cultural identity salience and tailor the use of AI to align with program values and intended audience(s), we recommend explicitly asking managers and participants about cultural identities. During our interview and focus group discussions in the doula program evaluation, we asked, “Has introduction to doula work through the doula program influenced your professional and/or cultural identity? How so?”

Rad Resources

• How Culture Shapes What People Want From AI presents a conceptual framework aimed at understanding AI use across cultures using independent and interdependent cultural models of the self and the environment. The article also includes a slideshow recording presented by the authors and a video animation of the cultural models.
• Story Circles of Black Doulas, Cultural Brokers for Birthing People in Healthcare utilizes Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Theory to frame narrative data from Black doulas to highlight their intersecting social identities and role as cultural brokers for birthing people in healthcare. 

We look forward to pondering this topic further and welcome conversation here in the comments or via LinkedIn on Courtney and Christina’s pages.

AEA is hosting GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.