Cultivating Multicultural Counseling Competence

Abstract

The concept of multiculturalism has traditionally referred to visible racial and ethnic cultural differences among people, and has expanded to include other marginalized and oppressed populations in the United States in the past 25 years. However, in the context of counselor education, there appears to be an incomplete understanding of what constitutes multicultural competence, the characteristics a competent counselor embodies, and how counselor education programs are evaluated for their efficacy in cultivating multicultural competence. The hypothesis guiding the current study was that there are shared characteristics between a mindful counselor and a multiculturally competent counselor such as cultural humility, increased awareness, genuineness, cultural empathy, and a non-judgmental disposition. To explore this further, the researcher used a mixed method research methodology to explore the phenomena of multicultural counseling competence and mindfulness. The qualitative aspect of this study involved the use of a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to correlate the attributes that are shared between these two phenomena, while the quantitative aspect involved using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale and Everyday Multicultural Competencies / Revised Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy to statistically measure the magnitude of the correlation between mindfulness and multicultural competence. A grounded theory for the cultivation of multicultural counseling competence is presented in the final chapter as a synthetic outcome of this study.