Project background
Purpose
The survey focused on addressing Project Goal 1 and 3 of the Meet. Learn. Share 2.0 program implemented by Hispanic Outreach:
• Project Goal 1: Increase social connectedness and belonging amongst and between Hispanic/Latino communities and Caucasian communities in Goodhue County.
• Project Goal 3: Empower the Hispanic community in Goodhue County to act with solidarity upon their expressed needs/barriers to improving their racial and health equity.
Progress toward these project goals was measured as changes in cross-cultural understanding and cultural competence for participants in the Meet. Learn. Share 2.0 program.
A total of 141 surveys were collected over six events. On average, 23 people attended each event. Figure 1 shows a breakdown of survey responses by gender, while Figure 2 shows a breakdown of survey responses by ethnicity. For both gender and ethnicity, five survey responses did not include gender or ethnicity data.
More women than men completed the survey and one participant identified as transgender female. More participants identified as Hispanic/Latino compared to White/Caucasian.
Meet. Learn. Share 2.0 participants reported 12 nationalities across four continents. Most participants reported their nationality as from the United States of America followed by Mexico and Guatemala.
The following report highlights the findings of the cultural competence survey implemented by Hispanic Outreach between January and May of 2024. The results show that the Meet. Learn. Share 2.0 program is effective at increasing social connectedness, belonging, and community solidarity across ethnic and nationality differences. These findings can help to define the continued development and growth of the Meet. Learn. Share 2.0 program and can inform Hispanic Outreach of the programmatic impacts on community and individual equity.
Methods
The survey (Appendix) was designed as a retrospective pre-post analysis of change, meaning that participants were asked to reflect on their general perceptions of equity at the end of the event compared to their perceptions before the event.
The survey was developed by adapting the Attitude, Skills, Knowledge, Solidarity (ASKS2) Short Scale of internalizations of attitudes, skills, and knowledge related to intercultural competence (Purdue University, n.d.).
Participants were asked to rate their level of agreement in response to 19 statements using a Likert scale of “disagree”, “neutral”, “agree”.
Using both indirect and direct indicators of cultural competence, the survey grouped the 19 responses into four main themes:
Attitude: measured as Openness and Curiosity to other cultures
Skill: measured as ability to practice cross-cultural Communication and Empathy
Knowledge: measured as Worldview and Self-Awareness as the lens for walking in the world
Solidarity: measured as the sense of unity and interest in supporting groups of different identities
At the beginning of the survey, optional participant demographic questions were included, such as ethnic and gender identity and the number of Meet. Learn. Share 2.0 events the participant had previously attended.
The survey was written in English and translated into Spanish using a double-translation methodology to preserve the survey meaning.
All participants at Meet. Learn. Share 2.0 events between January and May 11, 2024, were asked to complete the anonymous survey in either English or Spanish.
Hispanic Outreach staff were available for assistance if participants were unable to complete the survey on their own.
The survey data was sent to HACER for entry into Excel for data cleaning and analysis; HACER provided individual event analysis for the first four events in the series.
One change was made to the survey after the second event to provide a question related to nationality to compare changes in cultural competence between Hispanic/Latinos from different countries.
The survey was designed to measure 19 indicators of cultural competence. Some of the indicators work together to measure the same cultural competence theme, and the average change across those indicators can be used to show change in the specific skill.
The number of surveys that selected “agree” to each indicator were counted, then divided by the total number of survey responses to provide a percentage.
This percentage is called the “average percentage of indicators that showed an increase in cultural competence among participants”.