The Cultural Ecogram: A Tool for Enhancing Culturally Anchored Shared Understanding in the Treatment of Ethnic Minority Families

Abstract

Ethnic and racial disparities in mental health care continue to exist, highlighting the increasing concern within the realm of clinical practice as to how clinicians are to effectively integrate the central role of culture and context into the treatment delivery process for culturally diverse children and families. The current paper presents the Cultural Ecogram, - a clinical engagement tool designed to facilitate the development of a culturally anchored shared understanding – as one method that may facilitate clinician-client shared understanding on the client’s cultural, ethnic and racial context central to the effective implementation of treatments with ethnic minority children and families.

Fostering Information Literacy

“…Rather than viewing discrete segments of the information landscape via social work education and practice, it may be useful to visualize these connections through the timehonored social work approach of diagrammatic representations such as the ecomap (Hartman, 1995), the genogram (McGoldrick et al, 2008), and the cultural ecogram (Yasui, 2015; see Figure 1). Using such an approach, the interconnectedness between information literacy, educational and professional standards, and social work values becomes increasingly clear.…”

Testing and Assessment in an International Context: Cross- and Multi-cultural Issues

“…Several authors, have adopted and developed narrative and contextual approaches to assess clients from diverse cultures (Busacca & Rehfuss, 2017;Laher & Cockcroft, 2017). Yasui (2015) developed a process of clinical practice based on cultural experiences that foster cultural exchange. The goal of such a procedure is to obtain information about various aspects of a client's life, which might be affected by cultural factors in order to incorporate this information into the career counselling process.…”