Dennis C. Wendt

Critical Cultural Awareness: Contributions to a Globalizing Psychology

The number of psychologists whose work crosses cultural boundaries is increasing. Without a critical awareness of their own cultural grounding, they risk imposing the assumptions, concepts, practices, and values of U.S.-centered psychology on societies where they do not fit, as a brief example from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami shows. Hermeneutic thinkers offer theoretical resources for gaining cultural awareness. Culture, in the hermeneutic view, is the constellation of meanings that constitutes a way of life. Such cultural meanings-especially in the form of folk psychologies and moral visions-inevitably shape every psychology, including U.S. psychology. The insights of hermeneutics, as well as its conceptual resources and research approaches, open the way for psychological knowledge and practice that are more culturally situated.

Rethinking cultural competence: Insights from indigenous community treatment settings

Multicultural professional psychologists routinely assert that psychotherapeutic interventions require culturally competent delivery for ethnoracial minority clients to protect the distinctive cultural orientations of these clients. Dominant disciplinary conceptualizations of cultural competence are “kind of person” models that emphasize specialized awareness, knowledge, and skills on the part of the practitioner. Even within psychology, this approach to cultural competence is controversial owing to professional misgivings concerning its culturally essentialist assumptions. Unfortunately, alternative “process-oriented” models of cultural competence emphasize such generic aspects of therapeutic interaction that they remain in danger of losing sight of culture altogether. Thus, for cultural competence to persist as a meaningful construct, an alternative approach that avoids both essentialism and generalism must be recovered. One means to capture this alternative is to shift focus away from culturally competent therapists toward culturally commensurate therapies. Indigenous communities in North America represent interesting sites for exploring this shift, owing to widespread political commitments to Aboriginal cultural reclamation in the context of postcoloniality. Two examples from indigenous communities illustrate a continuum of cultural commensurability that ranges from global psychotherapeutic approaches at one end to local healing traditions at the other. Location of culturally integrative efforts by indigenous communities along this continuum illustrates the possibility for local, agentic, and intentional deconstructions and reconstructions of mental health interventions in a culturally hybrid fashion.

In Search of Cultural Diversity, Revisited: Recent Publication Trends in Cross-Cultural and Ethnic Minority Psychology

Given the increasing proportion of ethnic minority individuals in the United States and psychologys historical reliance on theories derived from Euro American populations, it is important to monitor the status of cultural diversity research. We conducted a 10-year follow-up to Hall and Marambas (2001) report of cross-cultural (CC) and ethnic minority (EM) publication trends. Comparing data from 1993–1999 and 2003–2009, we found that research on CC and EM issues continues to be underrepresented in the literature, particularly in top-tier journals. The American Psychological Association and Association for Psychological Science journals mirrored this discouraging trend, and the absence of top CC and EM authors on their editorial boards may point to a structural barrier to broader inclusion of cultural diversity research. We also found that fewer top CC and EM researchers are employed in psychology departments than one might hope, reflecting predominant attitudes within psychology of CC and EM research as peripheral to the larger field. Although clear that few gains have been made despite numerous awareness-raising efforts, the precise deficits were somewhat obscured, because the CC and EM terminology employed by Hall and Maramba (2001) did not fully capture the breadth of cultural diversity research currently underway in psychology. Thus, future attempts to assess the field would benefit from wider-reaching search terms. Additionally, we suggest that attention to reorganization within the evolving fields of cultural diversity research and to developing new categories of inquiry for research on cultural diversity that maintain focus on minority statuses in the United States may be productive routes forward for psychology as a discipline.

Potentially Harmful Therapy and Multicultural Counseling Bridging Two Disciplinary Discourses

In recent years, psychologists have been increasingly concerned about potentially harmful therapy (PHT), yet this recent discourse has not addressed issues that have long been voiced by the multicultural counseling and psychotherapy movement. We aim to begin to bring these seemingly disparate discourses of harm into greater conversation with one another, in the service of placing the discipline on a firmer foothold in its considerations of PHT. After reviewing the two discourses and exploring reasons for their divergence, we argue that they operate according to differing assumptions pertaining to the sources, objects, and scope of harm. We then argue that these differences reveal the discipline’s need to better appreciate that harm is a social construct, that psychotherapy may be inherently ethnocentric, and that strategies for collecting evidence of harm should be integrated with a social justice agenda.

Advancing community-based research with urban American Indian populations: multidisciplinary perspectives.

The US has witnessed significant growth among urban American Indian (AI) populations in recent decades, and concerns have been raised that these populations face equal or greater degrees of disadvantage than their reservation counterparts. Surprisingly little urban AI research or community work has been documented in the literature, and even less has been written about the influences of urban settings on community-based work with these populations. Given the deep commitments of community psychology to empowering disadvantaged groups and understanding the impact of contextual factors on the lives of individuals and groups, community psychologists are well suited to fill these gaps in the literature. Toward informing such efforts, this work offers multidisciplinary insights from distinct idiographic accounts of community-based behavioral health research with urban AI populations. Accounts are offered by three researchers and one urban AI community organization staff member, and particular attention is given to issues of community heterogeneity, geography, membership, and collaboration. Each first-person account provides “lessons learned” from the urban context in which the research occurred. Together, these accounts suggest several important areas of consideration in research with urban AIs, some of which also seem relevant to reservation-based work. Finally, the potential role of research as a tool of empowerment for urban AI populations is emphasized, suggesting future research attend to the intersections of identity, sense of community, and empowerment in urban AI populations.

INCLUDING GOD IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: STRONG VS. WEAK THEISM

The authors first attempt to conceptualize theistic psychotherapy by discussing the relationship between theism and naturalism. Many psychologists have assumed that naturalism and theism can be combined in various ways, so the authors review the more prominent of these combinations at the outset. They argue not only that these mixtures are “weak” (i.e., they restrain God in some way) but also that they ultimately assume naturalism is incompatible in many ways with theism. The authors compare “weak” theism with a “strong” theism that does not restrain God or rely on naturalistic assumptions. This comparison is elaborated by distinguishing a published example of strongly theistic psychotherapy from three common types of weakly theistic psychotherapy, with corresponding examples from the theistic literature.

Integrating Professional and Indigenous Therapies: An Urban American Indian Narrative Clinical Case Study.

The authors present a narrative case study of an urban American Indian male college student who integrated Indigenous and professional therapies during an acute period of stress, loss, and depression. As the first published case of an American Indian in an urban context, this article expands on previous clinical cases by focusing on the client’s perspective relative to his own conceptions of help-seeking behaviors. Based on qualitative analysis of five audio-recorded interviews, this case utilizes an innovative methodology to portray four approaches to healing (medication, counseling, bonding, and spirituality) that contribute to holistic well-being. Implications for counseling psychologists include being aware of how some American Indian clients may (a) view professional treatment dynamics through a Native cultural lens (e.g., seeing ideal communication as a “rhythm”), (b) utilize an expanded range of therapeutic agents, (c) resist medication for cultural and spiritual reasons, and (d) refrain from discussing spiritual matters with professionals.

Group Psychotherapy in Specialty Clinics for Substance Use Disorder Treatment: The Challenge of Ethnoracially Diverse Clients

ABSTRACT Minimal research has explored how clinicians address race and ethnicity considerations in the context of group psychotherapy within substance use disorder (SUD) specialty treatment settings. This article is an exploratory qualitative study in an effort to narrow this gap, using data from semistructured interviews with 13 group clinicians at three outpatient SUD specialty clinics in the United States. Results are drawn from the portion of coded material pertaining to ethnoracial considerations. A predominant theme from the interviews was the importance of individualized care in terms of “meeting clients where they are at.” However, minimal attention appears to have been given to addressing clients’ demographic diversity. Overall, ethnoracial considerations were minimally addressed in groups, with clinicians framing such primarily in terms of “cultural” factors relevant to clinics’ treatment philosophies. Moreover, limited attention was reportedly given to acknowledgment of social inequities faced by ethnoracial minority clients (e.g., racial discrimination), even though a few clinicians reported concern that minority clients were less engaged in treatment. Clinical implications of these findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Perceived parental support and adolescent motivation for substance use change: a preliminary investigation

Abstract Background: The benefits of motivation to change may be enhanced depending on environmental factors, such as perceived parental support. Objective: We propose a quadrant model of perceived parental support and adolescent motivation with the following four possibilities: High perceived parent support/Low adolescent motivation; High perceived parent support/High adolescent motivation; Low perceived parent support/Low adolescent motivation; Low perceived parent support/High adolescent motivation. The purpose of this study was to examine the outcomes of each quadrant within a randomized clinical trial of adolescent substance use treatment. Method: Data for these analyzes were from the DATOS-A study. We used chi-square and one-way ANOVA tests to examine differences between the four quadrants on demographic factors, treatment engagement, and substance use treatment outcomes. Results: We found that participants in Quadrant 2 (high perceived parent support/high adolescent motivation) were the most likely to report that treatment was important (x2 = 34.34 (6), p < .001), and participants in Quadrant 3 (low perceived parent support/low adolescent motivation) reported the worst substance use outcomes across a variety of variables. In particular, adolescents in Quadrant 3 reported the most days of alcohol use in the previous month (F(3, 248.46) = 9.99, p < .001), which was nearly double that of adolescents within Quadrant 2. Conclusions: We found preliminary support of our conceptualization of perceived parental support and adolescent motivation, as adolescents in Quadrant 2 had higher treatment importance, and adolescents in Quadrant 3 reported the most severe substance use outcomes.

Substance use and treatment outcomes among Spanish-speaking Latino/as from four acculturation types.

The purpose of this study was to examine the association of acculturation with substance use treatment outcomes in a sample of treatment-seeking Latino/as (N = 405). The study used data from a multisite randomized controlled trial of a culturally adapted version of Motivational Enhancement Therapy delivered in Spanish. Berry, Kim, Minde, and Mok’s (1987) acculturation model was used to divide the sample into 4 types (integrated, assimilated, separated, marginalized), based on Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire scores. One-way analyses of variance, chi-squared tests, and repeated-measures regression were used to examine baseline acculturation, posttreatment outcomes, and follow-up outcomes. All participants were of Latino/a background, and 88.4% of the sample was male. Participants with greater acculturation to American culture (i.e., integrated and assimilated acculturation types) reported more substance use and associated problems at baseline, &khgr;2(3) = 20.5, p < .001, with the integrated type reporting the highest percentage of substance use disorder symptoms and problems (67.6%). No significant differences in substance use were detected among acculturation types posttreatment or at follow-up. Although the integrated and assimilated acculturation types were associated at baseline with more substance use and associated problems, all acculturation types seemed to benefit at posttreatment from an evidence-based culturally adapted treatment.