Cultural issues in evaluation ( from the blog :intelligent measurement)

 

Interestingly, when I was recently in Central Asia, it was explained
to me that evaluation in the Soviet tradition was traditionally seen as
an inspection-like function which would search for small mistakes for
which people could then be punished for (demotion or worse..).

In Africa, the perception is quite different. People see you as
coming to listen, investigate and relay what you have found. Those
working with NGOs are now familiar with evaluation.

Of course, cultural issues and how you are percieved can affect your
evaluation. I don’t believe there are any quick learning points except
to understand as much as you can about the cultural you are working in
– and to test your evaluation methodology and questions by discussing
with local people prior to any gathering of data.

This article (pdf)
has some interesting points on evaluating across cultures, for example,
explaining local relevance and usefulness of the evaluation and to be
careful in the use of questionnaire types (such as the Likert scale) which may be misunderstood in some contexts.

Glenn