The experienced influence or effect of cultural/racism issues on the practice of counselling psychology-a qualitative study of one multicultural training organization

Abstract

Counsellers' perspectives on how the issues of race and culture affect counselling, psychology and psychotherapy were explored in this phenomenological inquiry by distributing questionnaires to 108 co-researchers-all the staff and student of one multicultural counselling and psychotherapy training organization. It was left to the participants ot choose the terms to describe themselves (within the context of this research) and 31 different self-descriptions emerged. Content analysis and frequency measurements were carried out on the data obtained in response to our enquiry about their experience of how the issues of race and culture affect counselling, psychotherapy and psychology. We identified five cantegories of statements: positive, negative, neutral (‘it does not matter’), qualification (‘it takes time’) and a category we called ‘unclear’ (for those statements which were not possible to categorize). Fifty-four per cent of statement concerned the positive influence or effect of cultural/racial issues on their experience, while 22% were negative statements. Both positive and negative statement were then divided into sub-categories according to the content of the statements. Six different categories for positive statements emerged: learning/ understanding; positive emotion; commonalities and differences; reparativehealing; experiences of enrichment; and awareness or overcoming of prejudice. Four different categories of negative statements were found; errors/mistakes; prejudice/transference; inferior/bad feelings; and feeling de-skilled/competency issues. This being a phenomenological study, we did not attempt to make any generalization. However, it can be said that for the population we studied (which explicity affirms te value of cultural difference and the intergration of transpersonal dimensions with psychological counselling) racial and lcultural influences were subjectively experienced distinctly as very positive as well as moderately negative.