Barriers and challenges in the practice of multicultural counselling in Malaysia: A qualitative interview study

Abstract

Counsellors face a lot of problems and stressors in their daily lives. As a person, counsellors may face challenges to deal with their personal expectations and responsibilities in life, work, family and community. As a professional, counsellors may face difficulties in dealing with professional issues and ethical dilemmas in their professional practice such as countertransference and value conflicts. These raise issues concerning their perceived multicultural competence and the adequacy of their training. Informed by a multicultural counselling perspective and drawing on semi-structured interviews with 12 professional counsellors in Malaysia, this study discusses the types of barriers and challenges faced by Malaysian counsellors and how these challenges were manifested and addressed in the cross-cultural counselling sessions. Results revealed five emerging themes based on participant counsellors’ responses on the barriers and challenges encountered in their practice of multicultural counselling in Malaysia. These were challenges related to counsellors’, clients’, presenting issues’, third-party and specific contexts’ characteristics. Research implications for the education and training of counsellors in the specific Malaysian socio-political context are also discussed.

Keywords:

• multicultural counselling
• culture and diversity
• multicultural competence
• Malaysian counselling profession
• professional counsellors
• qualitative study

Acknowledgements

This study was part of the author’s doctoral research project and it was approved by the Standing Committee on Ethics in Research involving Humans of Monash University. The author has been granted permission to conduct this research from the Malaysian Board of Counselors or commonly known as Lembaga Kaunselor. The funding bodies for this study were Monash Research Graduate School (i.e. Postgraduate Travel Grant) for travelling expenses and Faculty of Education (i.e. Faculty Research Fund) and University of Malaya Research Grant (UMRG) for research related expenses. This research was supervised by Dr Janette Simmonds and Dr Cynthia Joseph, both from the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia.