The Relationship Between Counselors’ Multicultural Counseling Competence and Poverty Beliefs

Abstract

The authors explored the relationship between counselors’ multicultural counseling competence (MCC), poverty beliefs, and select demographic factors. Results of hierarchical linear regressions indicate that MCC is predictive of counselor individualistic and structural poverty beliefs. Implications for counselor multicultural training and immersion and future research directions are included.

Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competency Research: Opportunities for Innovation

“…Survey data indicate that counselors perceive themselves as moderately competent in terms of multicultural awareness and knowledge (Barden, Sherrell, & Matthews, 2017; Holcomb‐McCoy & Myers, 1999) and social justice counseling competency (Crook, Stenger, & Gesselman, 2015), particularly those with higher racial identity development statuses (e.g., Chao, 2012, 2013; Johnson & Jackson Williams, 2015) and greater counseling self‐efficacy (e.g., Crockett & Hays, 2015; Matthews, Barden, & Sherrell, 2018). Furthermore, those who report higher levels of multicultural counseling competency also indicate greater perceived competency working with clients of color (Worthington, Soth‐McNett, & Moreno, 2007), individuals in poverty (Clark, Moe, & Hays, 2017), transgender and gender‐nonconforming people (Couture, 2017; Dispenza & O’Hara, 2016), and individuals of a variety of spiritual or religious backgrounds (Dailey et al, 2015).…”

Predictors of Broaching: Multicultural Competence, Racial Color Blindness, and Interpersonal Communication

“…We examined how counselors' interpersonal communication competence, a more general metric of skill engaging with clients, interacted with culturespecific factors to impact broaching. Given that self-report of multicultural competence might capture counselors' desired competence as opposed to actual approach in session (Owen et al, 2016) and that self-report can be inflated compared with other reports (Cartwright et al, 2008;King et al, 2020), we incorporated multicultural competence as a predictor rather than an outcome (following Clark et al, 2017). Moving multicultural competence research in the direction of effective skills training is a crucial next step for the counseling field (Alberta & Wood, 2009;Barden & Greene, 2015), motivating our focus on broaching and test of how multicultural attitudes (color blindness) impact multicultural skills (broaching).…”

“…To this end, some scholars have investigated relationships between specific attitudes and practices to multicultural competence. For instance, Clark et al (2017) found selfreported multicultural competence predicted beliefs about poverty and ability to work with underresourced clients. In terms of broader counselor practices, researchers (Ivers et al, 2016) have observed relationships between mindfulness and multicultural knowledge and awareness.…”

Counselor Education and Supervision: 2017 Inaugural Review

“…Topics explored included school counselors’ preparedness related to addressing human sexuality (Behun, Cerrito, Delmonico, & Campenni, 2017), experiences with classroom management (Buchanan, Mynatt, & Woodside, 2017), and preparation to serve LGBT youth (Kull, Kosciw, & Greytak, 2017); prior training tended to be associated with greater perceptions of preparedness. Finally, Clark, Moe, and Hays (2017) provided evidence for multicultural counseling competency as predictive of poverty beliefs.…”