Multicultural Considerations in the Assessment of Addictive Behaviors
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UsingtheCultureGridinCulture-CentredAssessment.docxUsing the Culture Grid in Culture-Centred Assessment
Reference for this article: Stewart, J. B. (2002). Using the Culture Grid in Culture-Centred Assessment. Guidance & Counseling, 18(1), 10
Abstract
Changes in Canadian demographics indicate that there are more ethnically diverse people who come from cultural backgrounds different from those of the dominant group. Counsellors need culturally sensitive techniques to capture the issues when working with culturally diverse clients. In this paper, the author discusses assessment in the counselling process from a culture-centred perspective. This discussion includes social learning theory, constructivism, and collaboration in assessment as perspectives, as well as an assessment model--the Culture Grid. The Culture Grid is described and its uses are explained within the context of social systems variables and their related cognitive, affective, and behavioural dimensions.
The Canadian demographic landscape is changing to reflect a more diverse group of people whose ethnic origins are not European. Currently, approximately 30% of the Canadian population reports their ethnic origin to be other than British, French, or Canadian (Statistics Canada, 1996b). In Canada, currently I in 9 people belong to a visible minority, and by the year 2016 visible minorities are expected to reach 20% of the adult population (Statistics Canada, 1995). This demographic make-up is most visible among school-aged children. For example, one of the fastest growing groups in Canada is the Aborginal population between the ages of 15 and 24 (Statistics Canada, 1996a). Also, by the year 2016, 25% of children in Canada will be from families that are considered a visible minority (Statistics Canada, 1995). In addition, there are growing numbers of people with multiple ethnic backgrounds due to intermarriage between people whose families are second or third generation Canadian (Statistics Canada, 1996b). These changes have implications for counsellors whose programs and services will serve this culturally diverse population. Furthermore, counsellors are more likely to find themselves serving clients whose backgrounds are culturally and ethnically different from their own.
One of the key counselling process tasks is assessment. Two important concerns in multicultural assessment include the validity of universal psychological constructs or concepts, and the results of an incorrect diagnosis due to a lack of awareness of cultural-based factors (Baruth & Manning, 1999). Counsellors guard against the error of thinking that all people experience issues as they do when they are aware of their ethnic and cultural experiences and understand their concepts about the reasons people have for their interpersonal behaviour. When counsellors assess clients whose backgrounds are ethnically and culturally different from their own, they need to be knowledgeable about their clients' ethnic and cultural experiences. Without this knowledge, counsellors may be unable to diagnose problems, develop counselling goals, and plan and assess interventions designed to help clients overcome their presenting concerns (Baruth & Manning, 1999).
To meet the demands of a culturally diverse population, Pedersen and Ivey (1993) suggest that counsellors utilize a "culture-centred" perspective. When counsellors use a culture-centred perspective they view interpersonal behaviour from a wide domain of similarities and differences that exist within Canadian society and are aware of the diversity of norms that regulate interpersonal behaviour. This view recognizes that there are many social systems variables that influence a client's psychological perspective. This perspective is known as the emic perspective (Drummond, 2000). The emic perspective is culture-specific and examines behaviour from within a culture. This perspective promotes a view of the "culture in the person," and not the view of culture as composed of a number of sociological variables--a perspective known as the etic perspective (Drummond, 2000). By taking a culture-centred view, counsellors can identify the key social variables that influence a client's behaviour. From a culture-centred perspective, counsellors look for the diversity that exists within the culturally diverse client. This perspective helps counsellors provide competent services to all clients regardless of ethnicity and culture, and avoids the risk of stereotyping clients from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
In this paper, assessment is used to describe the activity of gathering information about clients and their presenting concerns. It is a process that begins during the initial interview and becomes more focused during the early phases of the counselling process. Assessment includes direct counsellor observation and evaluation of the client, asking questions, reading client journals and writings, and other methods of gathering background history and assessing current functioning. Assessment, as it is used in this paper, does not include the use of standardized tests, nor does it involve classifying individuals into diagnostic categories. Simply put, from a cultural perspective there are three tasks of assessment: assessing the client's beliefs, assumptions and world-view, understanding the client's ethnic or cultural group, and using a combination of approaches to understand the dimensions of the presenting concern (Baruth & Manning, 1999).
This paper has two main purposes: to present a model that will help counsellors collect salient information in their assessments when working with culturally diverse clients; and to focus on three perspectives that help to frame assessment as they relate to counselling practice with culturally diverse clients. While it is not within the scope of this paper, the author notes the importance of counsellors gaining cultural awareness and knowledge--both of themselves and their clients--and learning culturally appropriate skills to competently conduct culture appropriate assessments. This knowledge is considered a prerequisite to the assessment process.
THE CULTURE GRID: A MODEL FOR CULTURE-CENTRED ASSESSMENT
The Cultural Grid (Pedersen & Pedersen, 1985; Pedersen & Pedersen, 1989; Pedersen & Ivey, 1993) conceptualizes a number of social system categories within which to organize the salient variables in a client's presenting concerns. The Grid is composed of two broad categories of variables: social systems variables and cognitive variables. There are four social systems variables (these variables are not exhaustive; others, such as religion, may also be relevant): ethnographic including nationality, ethnicity and language; demographic including gender, age, and others; status level including educational, social and economic; and, affiliation including formal and informal. The cognitive variables include role behaviour, expectations, and values. The model suggests that a person's values, expectations, and behaviours are patterns learned from the group(s) with which that person has affiliated during his or her early socialization. The model is built around two assumptions: the causes of difficulties that arise when there is a difference between the behaviour, expectations, and/or values within a person or between two people; and, the best way to understand and clarify these differences is to see them within broad social system categories within which the individual was raised and/or presently lives.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES TO CULTURE-CENTRED ASSESSMENT
The Culture Grid has its origins in social learning theory, a framework which is helpful to understand the behaviours of culturally diverse clients. Social learning theory suggests that behaviour is influenced by three inter-related domains: cognitive, behavioural, and environmental (Allen, 1994; Engler, 1991; Mitchell & Krumboltz, 1996). This perspective, known as reciprocal determinism, stipulates that external environmental stimuli influence behaviour through intervening cognitive processes. Cognitive processes determine which stimuli will be recognized, and how they will be perceived and acted upon. These cognitive processes enable the individual to anticipate different courses of action and their consequences.
This theoretical framework suggests that there are two types of learning experiences that result in the behavioural, cognitive, and affective components of behaviour (Mitchell & Krumboltz, 1996). Instrumental learning experiences occur when an individual is reinforced for performing some behaviour. Associative learning experiences occur when an individual associates a neutral event with an emotionally laden event. This association may be direct or indirect. From these two learning experiences, individuals develop self-efficacy--a constellation of cognitive factors that influence whether they develop and use the cognitive and behavioural skills required to perform a task (Bandura, 1982). Furthermore, as a consequence of learning, individuals develop another group of cognitive variables that influence decision-making called locus of control (Rotter, 1966). Individuals will make decisions based on criteria ranging from self-centred (known as an internal locus of control) to other-centred (known as an external locus of control).
Social learning theory (Allen, 1994; Engler, 1991; Mitchell & Krumboltz, 1996), along with its related variables, is an appropriate domain of knowledge that is useful to understand how interpersonal behaviour develops. Within each culture, individuals learn ways to behave, which are taught by significant others. Counsellors who adopt this perspective will view behaviour as learned during the course of an individual's socialization and developmental history. This learning may be problematic for people who move from one culture to another and who have not made allowances for learning the behavioural expectations of the new culture. When helping culturally diverse clients take responsibility for dealing with their concerns, counsellors must understand their clients' self-related learning and their understanding of societal behavioural expectations, and determine the contexts within which the presenting behaviours are not facilitative. Assessments based on behavioural and cognitive variables lead the way for interventions centred on teaching culturally diverse clients new cognitions and behaviours to help them interact effectively within the dominant group culture.
In addition to using a social learning perspective, counsellors should adopt a constructivist perspective (Neimeyer & Neimeyer, 1996) as an orientation to their assessments in counselling culturally diverse clients. Constructivists suggest that people are actively oriented to a meaningful understanding of the world in which they live. They suggest that human understanding is contextually embedded within the individual's cultural environment and is developed through interpersonal interaction with others. Assessment from this perspective accents individuals as co-creators of their personal understanding, as well as emphasizes that they organize this understanding into personally meaningful constructs. In addition, constructivists are interested in assessing the usefulness of people's perceptions and not the validity of their perceptions. A constructivist perspective enables the counsellor to realize that the variables that influence a client's behaviour are contingent upon his or her social learning within the culture of their home. This perspective helps to account for the diversity in the variables that influence behaviour both within and between cultures.
Assessment from a culture-centred perspective should be also a collaborative enterprise (Moreland, 1996). Counsellors need to involve culturally diverse clients by asking them to help formulate the questions to be answered, and also possibly involve significant persons in the client's life. Without this collaborative involvement, counsellors--unless they are thoroughly familiar with the client's culture--risk posing irrelevant questions for the assessment. Counsellors need to interpret the data given by culturally diverse clients and their significant others against the degree of acculturation between the client and the dominant culture. The assessment results should be explored with the culturally diverse client and in some cases with others important to this client. Such an approach maximizes the chances that the results and the recommendations for action will be acceptable. Also, the assessor should seek feedback about the client's satisfaction with the assessment process.
Prior to using the Culture Grid, the counsellor should explore a number of topics with a client, which include the client's place of birth, number of generations of the client's family in Canada, family roles and structure, language spoken at home, fluency in English, family's economic situation and status, amount and type of parental education, amount of acculturation, traditions still practiced in the home, familiarity and comfort with the Canadian lifestyle, religious affiliation, and community and friendship patterns (Diller, 1999). Together these items provide a basis for understanding the client's ethnic and cultural background.
More specifically, the counsellor must help clients identify all the relevant persons and behaviours presented in the concern in order to understand their interpersonal dimensions. The counsellor needs to identify a number of person variables such as age, relationship to the client, cultural background, education level, years and generations in the country, as well as any community affiliations. The counsellor can identify the behaviours inherent in the incident by having the client indicate the events surrounding it. This may be accomplished by asking such questions as "What happened just before the incident took place?" along with "Where did this occur?" "What else was going on?" or "Who else was there?" Next, the client is asked to describe the incident including the sequence of behaviours and the feelings associated with the event. Lastly, the client is asked to describe what happened after the incident occurred and the consequences of the behaviours described in the incident.
In addition, the counsellor must determine, with the client's help, the positive outcome expectations that were anticipated from the incident. This can be done by posing the expectation and the resultant behaviour in an "if .... then" fashion. For example, "if I do this, then this will happen." Following this, the counsellor should identify the value(s) that are evoked in this incident. Identifying these values is easier if the counsellor probes the underlying social system that taught the values and understands these expectations and behaviours within the client's social learning history.
The results of this exploration will be profitable in two ways: to understand the degree of the client's acculturation, and to compare the degree of acculturation to the cultural norms within the culturally diverse client's home and other affiliations (Sue, Ivey, & Pedersen, 1996). Such information is helpful to understand where the similarities and differences lie between the client and his or her affiliations, and overall, to better understand the cultural and behavioural realities for the culturally diverse client. Without this information, the Culture-Centred Assessment counsellor may make erroneous assumptions about the client and impose dominant group values and expectations upon the culturally diverse client. This imposition would be a form of what Ridley (1995) calls unintentional racism. Once the counsellor understands the client's personal cultural orientation, he or she can begin to explore the dynamics of the presenting concern.
ASSESSING INTRAPERSONAL AND INTERPERSONAL DIMENSIONS
One of the practical advantages of the Grid is to increase the counsellor's assessment of the client's behaviour within the client's context. This assessment takes place along two dimensions: the intrapersonal dimension and the interpersonal dimension. An intrapersonal assessment permits the counsellor to understand how the client has combined the salient features of his or her culture into a personal orientation, in other words, the "culture within" the person. An interpersonal assessment allows the counsellor to understand the origins of difficulties between two people.
The first step in using this Grid is to distinguish between the interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of the difficulty (Pedersen & Pedersen, 1985). An interpersonal conflict occurs when two persons or groups know what the other expects of them but disagree on what behaviour should be used as they relate to one another. For example, if there is high agreement on what the expectations are but differences on what the behaviour should be, then there could be an interpersonal conflict. Two teenage boys, one from Asia, the other from Canada, may agree on being friends. However, the Asian-Canadian boy may expect that being friends involves holding hands. The Eurocentric Canadian boy may not see holding hands as appropriate teenage male behaviour.
Additionally, two people may agree that seniors should be respected but disagree on whether a respectful greeting is a bow or a handshake. However, if there is a high agreement on what the behaviour should be but low agreement on the expectations, then there could be an intrapersonal conflict. For example, two people may behave appropriately in the presence of seniors but disagree on how much respect should be shown to them. Furthermore, scholastic success may be valued by two students. However, the Eurocentric Canadian student may see scholastic success in terms of personal advantages while the Asian-Canadian student may see success for the honour of his or her parents and wonder why the Eurocentric Canadian friend is so self-centred.
If the intrapersonal conflict is identified and differentiated from an interpersonal conflict, then a number of positive outcomes are possible (Pedersen & Pedersen, 1989). The different behaviours will be understood to reflect the shared expectations. The two people will conclude that they do share the same expectations even though their behaviours are different. Both persons might modify their behaviours to match the other or move toward a position where expectations and behaviours are shared. Both persons may conclude that there is high or low agreement between their perspectives and/or level of understanding about behavioural expectations of the other. However, if the interpersonal conflict is not identified and distinguished from the intrapersonal conflict there are a number of possible negative outcomes (Pedersen & Pedersen, 1989). The different behaviours may suggest that expectations are different and that the two people do not share the same expectations--particularly if the behaviours persist. One of the persons may choose to modify his or her behaviour to match the other. The people involved could resort to conflict where expectations and behaviours are different and misunderstood. Also, both partners might conclude that there is a low level of agreement between them. However, they may be unaware that there may also be a low level of accuracy in their communication.
This analysis is helpful for counsellors to frame their assessment and determine both the intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions of the presenting concern. Whether the concern presented is an intrapersonal or interpersonal one, its assessment will have implications for counselling interventions and ultimately for successful counselling outcomes (Pedersen & Pedersen, 1989). Based on the information learned about the client's personal cultural orientation and the client's social learning, the counsellor may want to identify any positive expectations that are shared by both individuals in the presenting concern. This agreement can be used as a basis for common ground upon which to resolve the difficulty. Using the example of the Asian-Canadian and Eurocentric Canadian teenage boys, the agreement that they want to be friends is a basis upon which to start counselling. Next, the counsellor needs to develop a number of hypotheses that might account for the differences in expectations and/or behaviours. The more hypotheses that are developed, the more likely the counsellor is to achieve accuracy in his or her assessment, and the more likely positive outcomes will proceed from the counselling process. After these hypotheses are explored with the client, the counsellor will narrow the number to those that are most salient to the context. Narrowing the hypotheses will lead the counsellor to determine whether the concern is primarily an intrapersonal or interpersonal conflict or contains elements of both. It is possible the client has adopted different values and expectations from her or his family and other affiliations. If so, then the client may have to decide whether he or she wants to maintain these and live with the consequences, or change these to make them more compatible with his or her affiliations. For example, the Asian-Canadian boy may decide that holding hands is not appropriate within the Canadian context. On the other hand, the client may want to maintain traditional values and expectations learned within his or her culture but needs to learn new ways to maintain appropriate relations with individuals from the dominant group. Another possibility is that the culturally diverse client may want to change elements of his or her personal cultural orientation and learn new behaviours to live within the dominant group. In any event, the counsellor must help the client understand the implications of his or her decisions. Once the implications have been understood, the counsellor and client can begin to explore counselling goals.
Once assessment is complete, the counsellor may help the client to take other perspectives by using role-play methods (Young, 1992). The counsellor may assign as homework, for the client to observe, as accurately as possible, the behaviours of the other person in the context and to develop possible expectations the client may want to achieve. The counsellor may use peers from the client's non-dominant group as models to teach and coach new behaviours to the client. The counsellor may teach the client new behaviours and/or communication techniques to facilitate the client's interactions with the other person. It is possible that the two people will disagree as to the appropriateness of their behaviours even though their expectations agree. When interventions are based on comprehensive assessments, they are more effective in promoting interpersonal and intrapersonal understanding of behaviour with culturally diverse clients.
Counsellors can use the Culture Grid to teach their clients how interactions between cognitive variables and social systems variables combine to explain behaviour. Counsellors should not assume that culturally diverse clients will understand these complex interactions and the implications they have for their behaviours. In addition, counsellors may need to help culturally diverse clients articulate the values implicit in their behaviours, as well as help them become aware of their internal dialogue, i.e. their expectations. Using the Grid as a teaching tool will help culturally diverse clients understand that their social learning may be different from the one displayed within the dominant group. It can be used to teach culturally diverse clients the differences between intrapersonal and interpersonal difficulties as well as reveal the dynamics that help to explain how each occurs. Further, the Grid can be used to teach clients that the important thing is choosing the appropriate behaviour to bring about the desired expectation and to reflect upon the chosen value(s).
In summary, the Culture Grid has its origins in social learning theory but is broader in its scope. The grid is interactional in that it connects the client's perspective of his or her cultural context to behaviour in operational terms. It combines culture-general and culture-specific information and provides an explanation for the interconnections between the intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions of the client's functioning, which is useful in both teaching and assessment. The Grid derives classification from behaviour and enables the counsellor to gain a perspective of the client's personal cultural orientation by seeing how specific behaviours, expectations, and values relate to the social system variables. It permits the counsellor to form hypotheses about cultural and/or personal differences that are inherent in the presenting counselling concern.
Counsellors serve a plurality of clients--often clients whose cultural orientation is not similar to their own. To meet the needs of their clients, counsellors need to expand their professional competencies such as knowledge of the cultural expectations, values, and behaviours of the clients they serve. Counsellors need working models that are not culturally biased and whose components direct them to the salient features of presenting difficulties. In this paper, the author has described an assessment model--the Culture Grid--and explained how the model can be used to help culturally diverse clients understand their conflicts as experienced in the dominant culture. This assessment model, if used appropriately, will result in competent professional services for a broad spectrum of clients.
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By John B. Stewart, Faculty of Education University of New Brunswick
