This article presents the Multicultural Counseling Inventory (MCI), a self-report instrument that measures multicultural counseling competencies. Study 1 comprised 604 psychology students, psychologists, and counselors in a midwestern state. In Study 2, respondents were a national random sample of 320 university counselors. Instrument analysis included exploratory principalaxis factor analysis with oblique rotation, assessment of factor congruence between the factor structures of the 2 samples, LISREL confirmatory factor analysis to test the relative goodness of fit of 6 competing factor models of the MCI, and tests of internal consistency reliabilities. Results indicated that the MCI has 4 factors: Multicultural Counseling Skills, Multicultural Awareness, Multicultural Counseling Relationship, and Multicultural Counseling Knowledge. A higher order, more general multicultural counseling factor is also discussed.

Much research on counselor preferences of racial and ethnic minority respondents has focused on the demographic characteristics of the counselor or on the within-group differences of the minority respondents. For instance, Littrell and Littrell (1982) showed significant effects of dress and sex on the counselor preferences of Sioux students from a reservation high school. When studying the relationship between respondents' racial self-designation and counselor preference, Jackson and Kirschner (1973) found that self-labeled Blacks and African Americans more often preferred a counselor of African descent than did those who labeled themselves as Negro. Employing four levels of Black racial identity development as independent variables, Parham and Helms (198 1) showed that pre-encounter racial attitudes significantly predicted a preference for White counselors, while encounter attitudes significantly predicted a preference for Black counselors. Similar to the findings of Parham and Helms, Sanchez and Atkinson (1983) found that respondents with a strong commitment to only the Mexican American culture expressed the greatest preference for a Mexican American counselor, whereas respondents with a strong commitment to only the Anglo-American culture were least concerned that they see an ethnically similar counselor. These findings provide insights regarding the important influences of counselors' race or ethnicity and demographic characteristics and of minority respondents' within-group attitudinal and value differences.Such findings, however, also have certain limitations. First, it is unclear how these findings relate to a counselor's multicultural coun-Gargi Roysircar Sodowsky is a n assistant professor in the Counseling Psychology

The relationship between the number of task, interpersonal, and hindering events and session outcome was examined for prepracticum trainees. Implications for counselor training are discussed.

Establishing peer relationships is an important part of social development in children. Children who are social isolates or rejected by their peers may be at risk in their social relationships during adolescence and adulthood. Two main approaches to intervening in peer relationships have been employed over the past sixty years: the first emphasises the individual’s role as a member of a peer group, while the second focusses on improving social skill learning and performance. The research evidence is reviewed with respect to both these theoretical approaches, with the social skills training (SST) approach being generally more clearly supported. Problems with the generalisation of social skills learned in the training program to actual social situations and to improved peer relationships are seen as requiring an extension of the behavioural SST approach. A social cognitive strategy which coaches children in making self-efficacy judgements of their ability to perform a task successfully is claimed to be a useful adjunct to the SST program. Specific teaching/coaching points are included as a guide to teachers who wish to help children improve their social skills and peer relationships.

This paper reports on the use of a cross-age tutoring program designed to improve the literacy skills of a profoundly deaf girl. In a novel approach to such programs, both tutor and tutee participants were profoundly deaf and used Auslan as their common mode of communication. The results of the program indicate that cross-age peer tutoring has potential as an effective strategy for improving the literacy achievements of deaf children like the tutee participant. Analysis of the videotaped interactions between tutor and tutee over the course of the program provided unique insights into the nature of English literacy learning by profoundly deaf students. These insights point to a role for strategies like cross-age tutoring where the particular experience of. deafness can be used to promote more effective interpretation and understanding of English for profoundly deaf literacy learners.