Although many attempts have been made to address cultural bias in assessment instruments, such biases still exist .

Unfortunately, although culture speci?c or culturally fair testing procedures are sometimes available, such approaches limit valuable information available to the interviewer. Culture speci?c assessment limits the person’s experience to membership of a particular group, thus missing the uniqueness of the individual; culturally fair assessment instruments tend to wash out the cultural in?uences, thus neglecting the impact culture has on a person’s life . While speci?c information regarding instrumentation is beyond the scope of this article, an interviewer working with a culturally different client should consider the following general questions: Are there other, less culturally bound options to obtain the necessary information? Are there ways to accommodate or ameliorate the cultural differences? Will the use of this assessment procedure help me to understand the individual’s experience as a unique cultural being? Additional guidelines for interviewing culturally different clients are provided in Table 13.1.

Multicultural and Diversity Issues 395396 Interviewing Special Populations Table 13.1. The Dos and Don’ts of Initial Sessions with Multicultural Clients The following are suggestions for interviewers working with clients who come from cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, or life experience backgrounds different from themselves. The applicability and relevance of each suggestion must be evaluated with the particular clinical situation at hand. Our intention is to provide a thought provoking checklist.

Whether two people can understand each other depends not so much on racial or cultural backgrounds, but on how strongly each of them believes in the correctness or even the superiority of what is personally familiar. Truly understanding someone from another culture begins with acceptance of differences as normal, interesting aspects of being human.

Social scientists have explored the phenomenon we refer to as stereotyping from numerous perspectives. One important ?nding is that, in general, stereotyping others varies inversely with the person’s experience with individual members of other groups.

Although simple exposure to different cultures is not suf?cient to end stereotyping, it can improve attitudes and decrease anxiety between individuals from different racial backgrounds .

Multiculturalism remains a hot issue in psychology and counseling. Not infrequently, discussion of multicultural theory and practice results in heated argument.

One example is an article published in the American Psychologist titled “Why Is Multiculturalism Good?” . The article emphasized a European American tradition and was subsequently attacked by numerous authors on a variety of grounds, including claims that Fowers and Richardson minimized the extent of contemporary discrimination and racism, portrayed multiculturalism as inherently adversarial, and were insuf?ciently realistic . What this series of articles demonstrates, aside from intellectual controversy surrounding multicultural issues, is that cultural and ethnic issues are inherently emotional. The implication for clinical interviewers is that individual clients’ cultural roots need to be explored and understood on an emotional level. More speci?c guidelines for multicultural interviewing are provided in Chapter 13.