Cultural Responsiveness
The multicultural literature has been fueled by an increasingly diverse nation that has impacted the nature of how we assess, diagnose, and treat all individuals. Several authors have suggested that accounting for clients’ values, culture, and context is an ethical responsibility and that an absence of these considerations within the therapeutic context results in cultural malpractice. Sue and Sue argued that many clinicians lack cultural compe- tence; however, more recently, Worthington, Soth-McNett, and Moreno conducted a 20-year content analysis of the Mul- ticultural Competencies Research and found that there have been increases in the number of articles published and research con- ducted in these areas. While the results of the Worthington et al. study indicate that we have continued to make progress in our understanding of multicultural counseling competencies, the gap between theory, research, and application remains intact. In the recently adopted Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice and Organizational Change for Psychologists, there is a call for the profession to reenvision our own conceptual models as a way to begin to change the philosophical nature by which we educate, train, and practice; additionally, Guideline 5 states, “This guideline further suggests that regardless of their practice site and purview of practice, psychologists are responsive to the Ethics Code”
