Augustine Barón

Counseling utilization by ethnic minority college students.

Although multicultural awareness in counseling has risen substantially in the last decade, little research has examined counseling utilization and outcomes for ethnic minorities on university campuses. A sample of 1,166 African American, Asian American, Caucasian, and Latino help-seeking university students from over 40 universities nationwide filled out the Outcome Questionnaire 45 (OQ45) at the first and last therapy sessions. Caucasian students attended significantly more sessions than all other groups. Greatest distress was found at intake in Asian American students, followed by Latino, African American, and Caucasian students. All groups appeared to benefit from therapy, as noted by a decrease in symptomatology, but none of the groups met the criteria for clinically significant change for the OQ45. Implications for therapists working with minority clients are discussed.

Symptom Improvement and Length of Treatment in Ethnically Similar and Dissimilar Client-Therapist Pairings.

This study examined the length of treatment and degree of symptom improvement of African American, Hispanic, and Caucasian clients as a function of therapist ethnicity using data obtained from 42 university and college counseling centers over a 2-year period. When analyses were collapsed across client-therapist ethnicity combinations, ethnic similarity was associated with a slightly longer duration of treatment. However, when a random deletion procedure was used to render the number of dyads within each ethnic group approximately equal, this effect was no longer obtained. When the ethnic groups were examined separately, there was a nonsignificant trend whereby Hispanic clients stayed in treatment slightly longer when paired with Caucasian versus Hispanic therapists.

Mini-reviews : Julian Rappaport Community Psychology: Values, Research, and Action. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977. Pp. xiii + 482

present a broad, yet in-depth overview of community psychology. As the subtitle indicates, the book is concerned with meta issues in the development of this subdiscipline of psychology, that is, the philosophical and political tenor (or zeitgeist) of the times within which community psychology has developed. Important intervention efforts that illustrate basic community psychology principles are analyzed and critiqued. The major headings from the table of contents highlight Rappaport’s global coverage: What is Community Psychology and Where Does It Come From?; The Social and Historical Context: Values, Faith, and the Helping Professions; Concepts from Community Mental Health; Concepts from Individual Psychology Useful to the Community Psychologist; Concepts of Social Intervention: Toward a Community Psychology; Strategies and Tactics of Social Intervention; Interventions in the Educational System: Pre-School Programs and the Failure of a Paradigm; Intelligence, Language, Cultural Relativism, and the Problems of the Criterian: Alternatives for Community Psychology and the Educational System; Interventions in the Mental