Teaching culturally informed psychological assessment: conceptual issues and demonstrations.
Multicultural assessment requires a strong conceptual foundation to address the complex and dynamic nature of culture. I present 3 conceptual issues as well as the demonstrations or exercises that I use to teach these concepts to students in a doctoral program of clinical psychology. The first conceptual issue is that multicultural assessment requires a solid foundation in traditional assessment theory and methods. Second, culturally informed assessors specify and test what about the social and cultural world matters to avoid making inferences based on group labels associated with ethnicity or race. Third, culturally responsive assessors must formulate and test both culture-specific and alternative (impairment or dysfunction) hypotheses, which refers to shifting cultural lenses (Kleinman & Kleinman, 1991). I then review exercises and demonstrations to illustrate these conceptual ideas. My aim is to help instructors guide students of assessment toward integrating a process-oriented way of thinking about culture, one that promotes a critical approach to our understanding of the role of culture in human behavior and its assessment.
López
Steven Regeser
SR
Department of Psychology University of California, Los Angeles 90095-1563, USA. Lopez@psych.ucla.edu
D018864:Cultural Diversity; D006630:Hispanic or Latino; D006801:Humans; D011586:Psychology, Clinical / Q000193:education*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000193:education*; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*; D014481:United States