Clinical and Training Implications of Privilege Awareness for Couple and Family Therapists: A Qualitative Thematic Analysis Part 2

ABSTRACT

The first of this two-part article series presents results from an analysis of how Couple and Family Therapists (CFTs) became more aware of their privileges. This second part specifically explores the clinical implications of privilege awareness on the therapeutic work of CFTs. CFTs participated in semi-structured interviews and identified common themes by which their privilege awareness influenced their clinical work: intrapersonal cultural attunement, interpersonal cultural attunement, socio-cultural theoretical attunement, and systemic attunement to policies and procedures. Using these identified themes, clinical implications for training and practice will be provided, including recommended questions for discussion as part of the process. Training programs and supervisors can utilize the following results and implications of part one and two of this series to consider the importance of facilitating the privilege awareness process as they help students build multicultural competencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Privilege
• couple and family therapy
• theory
• clinical training
• supervision
• qualitative
• thematic analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics declarations

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This study was reviewed and approved by the local Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Kansas State University. The IRB chair: Rick Scheidt. The IRB proposal number: #9955.