Culturally Competent Scholarship: Substance and Rigor

There is an urgency to the development of culturally competent care. This urgency is due to increasing diversity, increasing disclosure of identities, care delivery moving to homes, and increasing inequity in access to health care. The development of a knowledge base for culturally competent care is constrained by substantive and methodological issues, such as the limited view of culture as a unit of analysis and limitations in designs and methods that could capture the integrative nature of participants' experiences. Therefore, I propose that components of foundational knowledge in nursing may include, but should not be limited to, populations and their cultures; culture-specific nursing phenomena; and responses to diversity, marginalization, vulnerability, and transitions. To develop culturally competent knowledge, researchers, theoreticians, and reviewers are urged to address eight criteria to ensure rigor and credibility in scholarship: contextuality, relevance, communication styles, awareness of identity and power differentials, disclosure, reciprocation, empowerment, and time.