Multicultural Competency Workshop

Interviews with Culturally Diverse Individuals:
A Live Training Model in Multicultural Counseling Competence

A Workshop (3 hours)
Antioch University New England, Keene, NH

Gargi Roysircar–Sodowsky, PhD
Director, Multicultural Center for Research and Practice
Professor, Department of Clinical Psychology
Antioch University New England
40 Avon Street
Keene, NH 03431–3516
Phone: 603.283.2186
Fax: 603.357.1679
Email Gargi

Abstract

The workshop will make available culturally diverse individuals as interviewees. The interviewees will present issues related to their multicultural or diversity experiences. The training will include interview experience, assessment procedures, reflecting team discussions, and supervisory feedback. This process will enable trainees to increase their cultural self-awareness, in addition to understanding specific ways to implement the recent APA Multicultural Guidelines. The workshop is relevant for predoctoral interns, postdoctoral interns, psychologists, mental health professionals, and graduate students in professional psychology and mental health services.

Interviews With Culturally Diverse Individuals:
A Live Training Model in Multicultural Counseling Competence
The main purpose of the proposed training is to provide live interview experience with culturally diverse individuals. Although most would agree that the acquisition of multicultural knowledge and skills is the desired outcome of multicultural training in psychology, affecting trainees' awareness of their own assumptions, values, and biases about their culturally diverse clients is an important long-range goal initiated by live experiential training. This model of training is the workshop presenter's research in progress.

Training Format

The workshop will make available culturally diverse individuals as interviewees. The interviewees will present issues related to their multicultural or diversity experiences. Other than asking the interviewees to focus on their difficulties and coping as they adapt to the dominant culture, the interviewees will not be coached by the workshop presenter. Intake folders on these culturally diverse “clients” will be available prior to the interviews. After familiarizing oneself with the intake information of one's client, trainees will ask the culturally diverse individuals in one-to-one interviews to exchange stories about the interface of their personal/individual experiences with issues of race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or ability status. The trainees are expected to respond to the interviewees' stories by showing the extent of their understanding of what they have heard.

Trainee Culturally Consistent Interview Tasks

The culturally consistent tasks trainees will perform include (1) exercising interpersonal and verbal skills that are consistent with the culturally diverse individual's perspective on issues presented, (2) learning about an individual's multicultural experiences, and (4) demonstrating to the culturally diverse individual that the trainees can be empathic and empowering through their communications and efforts to serve.

Trainee Self-Assessment

Each trainee will respond at the end of the interview session to a self-report multicultural competence measure and to a working alliance measure.

Trainee Feedback and Consultation

While there will be only one trainee for each culturally diverse individual, each trainee will be assisted by a reflecting team that will be seated around the interviewer and the interviewee in fish-bowl style. During the interview, the reflecting team will not initiate feedback or intervention ideas. Therefore, there will be no interruption of a session from the outside. However, the interview will be broken into 15-minute units or segments. There will be three such units. After each segment, the reflecting team members will generate among themselves tentative hypotheses about the clients' concerns and suggestions for potential interventions. The trainee and the interviewee will listen to the discussions of the reflecting team without interrupting the team's exchanges. During the course of the interview, there will be no actual communication between the reflecting team and the interview dyad.

Trainee Process Notes and Client Assessment

At the end of the session, the trainees will write a one-page process note on the interaction. This process note will not describe the contents of the session but rather will be reflective of the dyadic process, with an emphasis on the trainee's cultural self-awareness as a result of the interview. The trainee will complete a case conceptualization form and rate the client on some multicultural assessment items. The reflecting team will assist the trainee in writing the process note and in completing the client assessment.

Outcome Evaluation

The interviewees will write summaries on their satisfaction with the interview and their perceptions of the trainees' credibility and multicultural competence. They will respond to the working alliance measure. They will complete a multicultural stress measure and a coping measure prior to (available in the client folder) and at the end of the interview. The interviewees will give their satisfaction summaries and completed self-report post-measures to the trainee who interviewed them and his or her reflecting team. The post-measures of each interviewee will be available to note change, if any. The trainees will provide their own self-assessments, their process notes, their brief case conceptualization form, and assessment of clients on multicultural items. Trainees, their reflecting teams, and the interviewees will discuss the relationships among various assessments.

Processing in the Larger Group

All participants will return to the larger group to discuss their experiences in the workshop. The larger group will discuss variations of match and mismatch between the trainees and clients. The benefits of such discussions will raise multicultural awareness in trainees. All participants will be thanked for creating feelings of safety, trust, and respect for everyone participating in a multicultural workshop.

Educational/Learning Objectives

This experiential training process provides “client” feedback, reflecting team consultation, group feedback, supervisory feedback, and outcome assessment results. Through this triangulation of diverse sources of information, trainees can expect (1) to gain perspective of a multicultural interaction that supplements book knowledge and challenges trainees' comfort at an affective level. Trainees will have the opportunity (2) to hear an individual's account of living in the U.S. as a culturally diverse person, as well as the opportunity (3) to address multicultural dilemmas, for example: a minority person's perceived inequalities and oppressions; a minority person's value assumptions that might differ from those of the trainees; and boundaries of comfort/discomfort when a minority individual discusses a personal account of a politically charged issue or a culturally unfamiliar practice or behavior. Other objectives include increases in (4) trainees' multicultural awareness and (5) skills in interviewing people culturally different from them. The overall goal of this workshop is to offer training in the development of cultural self-awareness.

Program Syllabus with Hourly Outline

First Hour:

Explanation on the content and process of the training, with overheads and handouts
Volunteers who are interviewers and interviewees will be introduced
Reflection teams will be formed and group leaders within each team identified
A case file will be read within each reflection team and the interviewer will prepare for the forthcoming session

Second Hour:

Interviews in three 15-minute segments (10 minutes all total)
Reflection team's interpretations and conceptualizations for 10 minutes each after each counseling segment
Ten-Minute Break

45 Minutes:

Interviewer writes process notes with reflection team
Interviewer completes Intake Form and case conceptualization with reflection team
Interviewer answers outcome measures, the Multicultural Counseling Inventory and the Working Alliance Inventory
Interviewee writes evaluation summary
Interviewee answers outcome measures, the Working Alliance Inventory and the Cultural Adjustment Difficulties Checklist
Interviewee joins the group to share feedback on the interview experience

10 Minutes
Processing in the big group
Post-test Questions and Answers

At the End of the Second Hour: Participants answer this question:
What perspective did you gain of a multicultural interaction with a culturally diverse individual who refers to multiple contexts? How does this perspective supplement your book knowledge or personal experiences? How does this new perspective challenge your comfort at an affective level?
Interviewees answer this question:
How did you benefit from the interviewee and reflection team's communications and efforts to serve you?

At the End of the Fourth Hour: Participants and interviewees will answers the following question:
How do you understand the outcome evaluations, including the evaluation summary provided by the interviewee, the trainee-interviewee alliance questionnaires, comments of the reflection team, supervisory feedback, and the subsequent discussion in the big group?

Read a complete evaluation from the workshop.