Multicultural Insights Test: Development of a Diagnostic Tool for Engaging Multicultural Populations

The dramatic growth of the multicultural population in the U.S. – primarily including Blacks, Latinos and Asians – has created an unprecedented demand for a workforce that can fulfill the needs of this growing segment for products and services that match their cultural and linguistic expectations. However, U.S. public, private and academic institutions have struggled to keep pace with this growing demand due to the relative absence of relevant training, and an over-reliance on resumes, language, and ethnicity as pre-qualifiers for such occupations. Further complicating this dilemma is the absence of a measurement tool that can identify individuals with the basic knowledge needed to work effectively with multicultural persons. In the long run, misplaced talent is costly to an organization, leading to employee turnover, job dissatisfaction, poor sales, decreasing market share, and pre-mature termination of multicultural projects. To address this workforce need, a team of multicultural experts developed a diagnostic tool entitled the Multicultural Insights Test (MIT) that measured knowledge in five core areas for the Black, Latino and Asian segments: demographic trends, language behavior, history, lifestyles, beliefs, and perceptions and how these core areas are related to decisions about hypothetical research scenarios. The MIT was administered to a nonprobability sample of respondents that included students, research practitioners, and other working professionals in the private and public sectors. Our analysis of the MIT results revealed that (a) the instrument had high reliability in measuring responses to the test items, (b) nearly half of the respondents lacked sufficient knowledge to answer the test items correctly and (c) performance on the core area of beliefs and perceptions about multicultural persons best predicted the accuracy of the decision-making scenarios. Based on these preliminary results, the MIT shows promise for further development to provide commercial and noncommercial organizations and data collectors a method of identifying their knowledge gap, readiness, and training needs when engaging multicultural populations.