Effects of a reflective cultural audit intervention on multicultural and social justice counselling competencies of counselling students

Abstract

Enhancing multicultural and social justice counselling competencies (MSJCC) has been important in the counselling field for a number of years. As such, counsellor educators are called to provide the relevant education for counselling students. To identify ways to increase counselling students' MSJCC, the researchers conducted an experimental study investigating the effects of reflective practice on MSJCC of counselling students. Participants were recruited from a large university in the U.S. and completed a survey at the beginning and the end of their practicum semester. They were divided into an experimental (n = 35) and control (n = 37) group. Students in the experimental group wrote reflective journals after working with clients from different backgrounds. Specifically, we used the intervention derived from cultural auditing where individuals answer questions based on the prompts that facilitated participants' reflection regarding their counselling sessions. In our study, we selectively provided participants with the prompts from the cultural auditing process. For instance, we asked what their initial reactions were to a specific client, what those reaction may indicate about their own beliefs, values and assumptions, what the client's rationale was for the problem and how it may fit with the ways that problems were conceptualised within their culture. Based on these prompts, counselling students in the experimental group wrote reflective journals. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was employed. Results showed that MSJCC was higher for those in the control group than those in the experimental group, F(286.573, 1) = 5.119, p = .027, ηp2 = 0.071. Implications for future research are discussed.

Fostering cultural competence: Exploring client perception in a health coaching intervention among college students

“…This finding aligns with previous studies showing that cultural experiential activities (e.g., engaging with people from other cultural areas; Choi & Kim, 2018) and well‐designed cultural care training model (Farokhzadian et al, 2022) significantly improved the levels of CC among college students majoring in a helping profession. In addition, this finding further reinforces the implication from a previous pilot study (Kim et al, 2022) that a reflective and experiential invention on CC could promote the development of cultural humility, which in turn represents the initial and essential step toward the continuous enhancement of CC.…”

“…In addition, this finding further reinforces the implication from a previous pilot study (Kim et al, 2022) Another notable finding is that significant differences in perceived levels of coaches' cultural humility were observed between racialmatching (n = 18) and nonracial matching (n = 6) groups at the pretest, with the racial-matching group reporting higher mean scores. However, no significant difference was found at the posttest, indicating convergence in perceived cultural humility.…”

“…While our study was not large enough to generalize our findings, we believe this is a feasible program for other higher education settings and encourage those in health science and other helping professions to explore the addition of health coaching coursework and peer health coaching experiences. We also anticipate that similar programs would have positive outcomes related to CC development, particularly if able to provide tailored training and supervision that address the varying levels of CC among students, incorporating reflective activities like journaling to heighten awareness of cultural biases for those with limited awareness (Kim et al, 2022), as well as encouraging the practice of cultural broaching for students with cultural knowledge seeking to apply it in practice (Day‐Vines et al, 2007).…”