Success Stories: Testimonials

James T. Swenson, Chief Judge, State of Minnesota Fourth Judicial District comments:

  • “Dear Mitchell [Hammer], Thank you for your expert presentation at the Fourth Judicial District Fall Bench Retreat on October 23. The information you provided, as well as the dialogue it created, has enhanced our awareness of the importance of intercultural development and addressed the issues facing the judiciary in upholding racial fairness in the courts.”
Dr. Donna Stringer, an internationally recognized diversity consultant, describes her use of the IDI with her corporate clients as follows:

  • “Providing training or coaching for individuals or groups is most effective when it is customized to the appropriate developmental stage. The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) provides stage-specific information so that developmental work can be most targeted for greatest effect. Dr. Hammer was instrumental in developing the IDI and has done an extraordinary job of continuing to improve the ease of administering the assessment and providing customized development plans. This tool is foundational to effective cross-cultural development.”
Kristina Gonzalez from the United Methodist church has extensively used the IDI. She comments:

  • “What a great tool! [the IDI] not only provides the recipient with understandable and digestible information, it provides for quality control in our interpretation.”
Mark Harden, Dean, Bethel University has increased the use of the IDI in his university over a number of years:

  • “We have been using the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) for newly enrolled students since 2004. The IDI has provided us with baseline data to help our instructors with guided development in the classroom with the option of a post-test. This also helps us to assess our teaching methods and the learning environment. In addition, we use the IDI to assess progress with intercultural development among faculty and staff. Although faculty development is largely self-managed, we have experienced a change in the organization’s culture with measured improvements in IDI profile scores. The IDI is accepted by most of our faculty, staff, and students as a credible tool for building capacity for intercultural competence.”
Pat Payne, Director of the Office of Multicultural Education, Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS), uses the IDI to increase the intercultural competence of teachers, students and parents:

  • “The IPS Office of Multicultural Education (OME) is charged with implementing the Indianapolis Public Schools’ Cultural Competency Action Plan (D-CCAP). Central to the success of D-CCAP is the ability to strengthen intercultural competency skills among teachers, students and parents so that the gap between the home culture of the students and the instructional strategies of the school is more compatible. As Director of OME, we feel confident that making the Intercultural Development Inventory a required component of D-CCAP is an important step in achieving this goal. One of the best professional steps I have ever taken was becoming an IDI Administrator. It has moved our district to the next level in achieving cultural proficiency and I wholeheartedly recommend its use.”
Lor Lee uses the IDI in healthcare settings. She describes her work:

  • “I am currently using the IDI in a couple of different ways. One example is the work I am doing with our first year family medicine residents. I am using the assessment to see where each of their intercultural competence level is at in year one and will assess them again at the end of year three to see if there’s been any significant movement… Another example is the work I’ve done with different leaders who lead diverse work teams within our organization. In an organization where 70% of the patients and 26% of our employees are minorities respectively, and where over 100 cultures with over 50 languages walk through our doors, intercultural competence is not only the right thing to do, but is important to providing patient and family centered care.”
Peter Bye, Principal of the MBD Group consulting company, extensively uses the IDI his corporate clients:

  • “We have been using the Intercultural Development Inventory or IDI since 2004 with corporate and not-for-profit organizations. IDI is a phenomenal instrument for individual and group applications. It is very flexible and the administration may be tailored to the client’s needs. . . . The strong statistical validity and reliability combined with the developmental construct of the reports make it easy to engage people in deep developmental learning. IDI is easily incorporated into a program design for individual coaching and for group or team development. For groups we can readily have participants experience the effect of mindset about diversity and cultural difference on their business outcomes, learn about the consequences of their mindset, and engage in business-focused development that the participants have seen will directly benefit their business.”
Dr. Bruce La Brack has used the IDI at the University of the Pacific for many years and concludes:

  • “[The IDI] provides invaluable information to both faculty and students that is available no other way. It also allows us to provide developmental instruction and cross-cultural training in practical ways and in a timely manner. It should be in the toolkit of any institution concerned with promoting and measuring intercultural competence.”
Professor Susan Sample, Ph.D., also from the University of the Pacific comments on the strong cross-cultural validity of the IDI:

  • “The IDI allows us to assess that development in our students in a way that is valid, reliable, and completely objective—as a scientist I really value having an assessment device that is externally validated, directly measures one of our goals, and that comes from outside our institution. We can be confident that the results we get give us a real indication of students are learning, not what we imagine or hope they might be learning.”
Doug Stuart, Director of Intercultural Training and Development of IOR Global Services, maximizes the impact of IDI results in the corporate sector through individual and team development:

  • “IOR uses the IDI in two quite different ways. We are often asked by clients to assess employees or new hires for international assignments where the employee will manage a diverse workgroup or a workgroup from another culture. We debrief the IDI profile with the new hire to help them become aware of their approach to difference and what their challenges might be in new environment. The degree of insight and appreciation this can bring is remarkable. We also use IDI group reports with management groups to help them understand, … the challenges to creating a more inclusive or interculturally competent workforce, to examine where they most need that competence, and to consider the different interventions that might be required with different groups in the organization at different levels of development. The IDI provides a powerful way for management and leadership to reframe their challenges around creating intercultural competence.”
Anne Marie Kenney is a diversity consultant who is using the IDI within correctional institutions:

  • “I am working with our state’s department of correctional services to design in-service Diversity and Inclusion curriculum for 2500 prison staff members and to provide training and consultation for the department’s 44 member executive team and diversity council.

    The IDI results … are giving me a considerable edge in designing the training curriculum for multi-levels of prison staff with concepts and approaches that relate to their mindset in the here and now. One phase of the project offers each member of the correctional department’s executive staff an option to request a confidential individual IDI consultation which includes recommendations for personal intercultural growth. So far, 85% have requested this service, which I believe demonstrates buy-in from the top leadership team, and confirms my belief that the IDI is an excellent tool and adds credibility to intercultural development projects.”
Dr. Michael Paige, Professor at the University of Minnesota, is an international expert on cross-cultural instrumentation and education:

  • I have found the IDI to be enormously valuable in my work as an intercultural/international educator and consultant. I have used it extensively in research programs intended to examine intercultural learning outcomes related to study abroad, … I have administered the IDI to students in my Intercultural Leadership and Intercultural Education and Training courses, and encouraged many students to become qualified administrators themselves. In consulting work I have done with school districts in the Twin Cities, I have used the IDI and IDI Guided Development processes to support intercultural competence among school administrators, teachers, and staff… As a person who has studied and written about intercultural instruments, I feel that the IDI stands apart in its focus on intercultural development and represents the “gold standard” of instruments in this area.
Dr. Michael Vande Berg, Vice President of Academic Affairs, the Council on International and Educational Exchange (CIEE) has used the IDI over a number of years to increase intercultural competence among students and teachers during the study abroad experience:

  • “Over the past two and a half years, the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) has been piloting a teaching and learning initiative that makes significant use of the Intercultural Development Inventory. … We’ve relied very extensively on the Intercultural Development Inventory since the beginning of this initiative. We knew, in planning the course four years ago, that without a valid and reliable means of accurately assessing the intercultural needs and progress of both teachers and students, we wouldn’t be able to meet our primary goal—to help students learn to interact more effectively and appropriately in new and unfamiliar cultural situations.

    We begin our training of staff and teachers who’ll be teaching the Seminar at our programs abroad by having each of them complete the IDI. In individually debriefing their reports, we work to help teachers understand that their own, as well as their students’, worldviews will significantly affect both how they teach the Seminar’s intercultural concepts and largely experiential activities, and how their students are likely to approach and learn through the course.

    Students complete the IDI shortly after they arrive at the program sites—ideally within the program’s first week. Teachers rely on information in the group and individual reports as an important way to identify their students’ intercultural learning needs. During the last week of the semester, their students take the IDI a second time—thus providing teachers and Portland-based staff with a valid and reliable means of understanding to what extent the course is meeting its goals. We use the IDI at our Portland offices for a third purpose, as we collect and analyze end-of-program scores to evaluate the success of the Seminar’s on-line curriculum, which all of the teachers follow during the first one or two semesters that they teach the course. Our discussions with new teachers during and after their first two semesters of teaching the course, and our analysis of student IDI data across all of our semester programs, allow us to identify broad patterns in the students/ response both to the curriculum and to the teachers’ facilitation of it, and to make adjustments in both the shared on-line curriculum and our coaching, for the following semester.

    We at CIEE have confidence in the IDI because rigorous testing has shown it to be valid and reliable. While decisions about the design and delivery of study abroad programs and courses have historically been based on little more than subjective observation and anecdote, the IDI is designed to get beyond student self report. … [The IDI] is a psychometric instrument that has been shown through rigorous testing to have both content and construct validity. When our students respond to [the IDI], we know they’re not merely offering subjective opinions, and we’re confident that they’re not normally able to “psych out” the test.”