After reading the material in the chapter, discuss the role of culture and cultural competence in quality evaluation.

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The Answer is The Statement defines culture as "the shared experiences of people, including their language, values, customs, beliefs, and mores." In this way, the Statement challenges the traditional belief that evaluation is an objective, culture-free enterprise. Instead, it asserts that evaluation is culture-bound and values-based. Culture and the associated values of evaluators and of those sponsoring an evaluation influence every phase and all aspects of an evaluation, including what is being evaluated, how it is being studied, what data are collected, how the data will be analyzed and interpreted, and which groups are included or excluded from an evaluation process. Furthermore, these cultural values are used to make judgments about the merit or worth of what is being evaluated, whether one recognizes it or not.
According to the Statement, "cultural competence is not a state at which one arrives; rather, it is a process of learning, unlearning, and relearning." Cultural competence is defined in relation to a specific context or location, such as geography (e.g., the Pacific Northwest vs. Central Texas), nationality (the place or country of citizenship or birth or the place from which a person descends shapes values, customs, beliefs), and history (e.g., past experiences such as abuses of groups of people influence their patterns of behavior such as adaptive cultural mistrust and parenting practices transmitted from one generation to the next). Thus, for each evaluation, a culturally competent evaluator (or evaluation team) must have specific knowledge of the people and place in which the evaluation is being conducted, including local history and culturally determined mores, values, and ways of knowing. The Statement indicates that cultural competence is effectively a stance toward culture. For example, evaluators must not assume that they fully understand the perspectives of stakeholders whose backgrounds differ from their own; they must make a concerted effort to understand and reflect those perspectives in the work.

After Reading the Material in the Chapter, Discuss the Role