Eating Attitudes of Native American and African American Women: Differences by Race and Acculturation

Thirty-tour Native American and twenty-eight African American women responded to eating disorders and acculturation measures. African Americans appeared to have greater concern about their body weight and shape than Native Americans. Among all, those who were more acculturated to the U.S. white culture reported more concerns than those who were less acculturated. Also, normal weight women tended to have higher anorexia scores than overweight women as well as a diagnosed anorexic group. Open-ended questions elicited feelings about U.S. symbols of beauty, one\u27s physical self, and usage of standard English. The conceptualization of acculturation to white society and acculturative stress is used to understand the study

Preface

Preface This work evolved from the 1993 Buros-Nebraska Symposium on Testing and Measurement: Multicultural Assessment, held by the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements, Department of Educational Psychology, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Among the symposium presenters, Stanley Sue, Juris Draguns, Guiseppe Costantino and Thomas Malgady, Janet Helms, Robert Carter, Sandra Choney and John Behrens, Joseph Ponterotto, Gargi Roysircar Sodowsky, and Donald Pope-Davis accepted the Buros Institute\u27s invitation to contribute chapters to an envisioned multicultural assessment volume. The authorssome with the assistance of new collaborators-painstakingly revised their papers. They added measurement and statistical analyses that they have not previously published, advanced the theory-building of their respective topics, and wrote integrative literature reviews, thus providing substantive chapters for this book. With reference to the few multicultural and cross-cultural assessment books, book chapters, and journal reviews that are currently available in professional psychology, this book is an essential complement to them. Its uniqueness is that it responds to the paucity of measurement research in multicultural counseling. This collection might be characterized as recording multicultural assessment\u27s empirical beginnings, a fairly unchartered territory. Select multicultural instruments that are paper-and-pencil attitude and projective tests, developed recently and cited in refereed journals, are presented. New data are treated to multivariate statistics, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, structural equation modeling, cluster analyses, reliability estimation, and norm transformations. Tests are shown to be construct-related to multicultural theories and/ or criterion- related to sociocultural variables. That is, instrument validity is supported through the theoretical groundedness of obtained results, through theory-building based on data interpretation, or through criterion predictions. Test bias of mainstream instruments are discussed statistically as well as conceptually. Differences in test scores are given an interpretation different from the conclusion that deviant scores indicate deficits. Clinical judgement is shown to be subject to individual bias and to clinicians\u27 immersion in their racial and cultural contexts and their inability to see their imposed bias. Decision trees, guidelines, and assessment reports are provided to illustrate qualitative methods for contextual diagnosis and integrative clinical judgement. Methods to identify social desirability in multicultural self-reports are discussed. Classical measurement theory is argued to overlook the multiplicity of person-environment reactivity that merits investigation in a multicultural society and in a majority-minority sociopolitical system

Epilogue

The book has shown the use of a combination of approaches to understand the nature of a problem: traditional diagnosis and standardized assessment, cultural and racial explanations as alternative hypotheses, clinical judgement based on a decision-tree involving cross-cultural and indigenous frameworks, quantitative-qualitative methods of data analyses, and the use of multicultural paper-and pencil and projective tests. The attitudes and cognitive-affective tests presented or referenced in the book, in addition to being formally administered, could be used as springboards for collaborative discussions with clients and psychology trainees in order to gain a better understanding of their values and assumptions and, by inference, their modes of problem-solving in a multicultural society. We look forward to these new instruments\u27 future refinements, psychometric enhancements, and diverse sampling of subjects. The measurement of acculturation attitudes is important in counseling and clinical psychology. Its importance to applications has been affirmed by the 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), and the 1993 APA Guidelines for Service Providers to Ethnic, Linguistic, and Culturally Diverse Populations, the latter stating that psychologists must document culturally relevant factors in client records, including number of generations in the country, number of years in the country, fluency in English, community resources, level of education, and level of stress related to acculturation. Because a multicultural book is incomplete without addressing issues of acculturation, Appendices A and B provide measurement and research information on acculturation scales. Appendix A summarizes select psychometric properties of and predictions for frequently referenced acculturation scales developed for Hispanic/Latino and Asian groups in the U.S. Appendix B summarizes select counseling psychology studies showing the effects of acculturation on client reactions. At the end of each Appendix is a reference list of the authors of the instruments and related research studies. We hope this work, Multicultural Measurement in Counseling and Clinical Psychology, will add to the long and colorful history of psychological assessment

Section One: Test Bias, Multicultural Assessment Theory, and Multicultural Instrumentation

Stanley Sue in Measurement, Testing, and Ethnic Bias: Can Solutions Be Found addresses multicultural assessment and research with experienced wisdom and scientific inquiry. His tone is amicable, communicating a problem-solving attitude. Owing to its applicability, Sue\u27s paper will appeal to a wide readership, with each reader finding a particular part especially meaningful. We find journalistic information on negligent diagnosis; a review of diagnostic studies; suggestions for new measurement methods to control for cultural bias in tests; analyses of a White prediction equation for the academic achievement of various Asians in the U.s.A.; ongoing research on MPPI-2 scores of diversely acculturated Asian Americans; hypotheses about Asian-American personality variables that influence responses to mainstream measures of psychopathology; and a discussion on institutional policy matters, something practitioners are rarely concerned about, but which is important to the advocacy of racial and ethnic equity. One is introduced to what is minority group status, culture, ethnicity, and the overlap of the latter two. Sue cites research where substantial misdiagnosis of American ethnic minorities consists of both over- and underpathologizing, and where misdiagnosis may have resulted from the interaction of client-clinician racial! ethnic match and mismatch. The main point is that American ethnics are more likely to be misdiagnosed than White Americans. Sue notes that the two popular ways of identifying test bias in personality instruments are factor analysis and regression analysis (analysis of items within an instrument has been used particularly in achievement and aptitude tests [Sue, 1994, private communication]). Sue addresses the nature and extent of bias when one group\u27s regression equation is used as the standard. He summarizes a previous study that reports predictors of Asian academic achievement. A White regression equation both overpredicted and underpredicted various Asian groups. Sue and colleagues used Whites as the standard because prediction formulas established by universities are based primarily on the White-American majority group. Sue emphasizes (1994, private communication) that over and underpredictions of CPA involving a difference of .17 is quite substantial, not only to student perceptions but also to admissions to graduate school. As one example, UCLA will not as a rule admit as graduate students undergraduates who have a cumula tive CPA of under 3.00. You can imagine how many students receive CP As between 2.83 and 3.00 .... Finally, at some universities (such as UC Berkeley), there were attempts to increase the weight of SAT-Verbal over SAT-Math performance in admission. According to our findings, doing so would probably reduce the ability to identify the best Asian American students

Section Two: New Developments in the Theories and Measurement of White and Black Racial Attitudes

Janet Helms in Toward a Methodology for Measuring and Assessing Racial as Distinguished from Ethnic Identity proposes (a) theoretical advancements in the Black and White racial identity models, (b) a nontraditional psychometric understanding of the White Racial Identity Attitudes Scale (WRIAS), and (c) assumptive differences in the constructs of racial identity and ethnic identity. Helms has introduced new concepts, such as, sociorace, racial assignment, societally defined racial classification system and societally regulated racial group, to argue that one cannot classify people in the U.S. according to genetic origins and phenotypes. Rather, race-defining characteristics are chosen by the White dominant group, the group that holds the political power. Thus, race is sociopolitically defined, and racial identity of an individual is the internalized consequence of imposed societal categories. Originally Helms had conceptualized racial identity as a linear, hierarchical developmental process. She used the construct of stages to describe the respective processes of U.S. Blacks and Whites who progress from negative and hateful attitudes to positive and healthy attitudes towards both the Black and the White racial groups. Helms has now suggested that ego statuses be used instead of stages when understanding a person\u27s racial self-conception. An intrapsychic status process is caused by a person-environment reactivity. But statuses\u27 are hypothetical constructs, which cannot be measured. What can be measured is the individual\u27s information processing strategy, as related to one\u27s currently predominant status. However, different information-processing strategies may underlie each status. Thus, two individuals governed by the same status may actually express themselves through different information-processing strategies (for example, in the Black Preencounter status, denial by one and individualism in another). One cannot conclude that any single sample of race-related behavior, as indicated by scale responses, reveals all of the statuses that are potentially accessible to a person. That is, because a status has differentiated to some extent in the person\u27s ego does not mean it will govern all of the person\u27s responses on a measure. Helms uses a circular diagram to represent the status profile of a person. The circle is used to emphasize that racial identity statuses are not hierarchical, in the sense that the use of one status does not preclude the use of another. These ideographic and dynamic aspects of racial identity have challenged Helms to rethink how to use her objective, Likert-type scales. Helms argues that the basic tenets of classical measurement theory (e.g., items need to be linearly related as in the case of internal consistency reliability) are probably not directly applicable to the measurement of racial identity statuses. Helms says that relationships among items may be underrepresented if one uses unadjusted linear methodologies to evaluate such relationships

Section Three: Measurement of the Relationships of Multicultural Counseling Competencies and Counselor Training

Ponterotto, Sodowsky, and Pope-Davis are paying attention to the nomological net encompassing multicultural counseling competencies for definitional and utilitarian purposes. The studies· reported in this section suggest that the Multicultural Counseling Awareness Scale (MCAS) and the Multicultural Counseling Inventory (MCI) are relatively reliable, valid, and pragmatic measures. Although the MCAS and MCI assess multicultural competencies, they differ in their item content, and, hence, in their operational definitions of multicultural knowledge, skills, and awareness. They have different numbers of factors. In addition, the item content of their respective factors/subscales indicates that the MCAS focuses on self-reported attitudes and the MCI on self-reported behaviors. Users need to be aware of the distinctiveness of the two measures and not treat them interchangeably. Nonetheless, one characteristic shared by the measures is their usefulness. After a decade\u27s emphasis in counselor preparation for increased multicultural responsiveness and relevant theory-building in training, the MCAS and MCI have made available devices to assess multicultural training outcomes. Joseph Ponterotto and his collaborators in Development and Initial Validation of the Multicultural Counseling Awareness Scale (MCAS) address (a) whether multicultural competence is a definable construct, and (b) whether multicultural growth acquired through training can be assessed. After defining constructs a priori on the basis of preceding landmark papers on multicultural counseling competencies, the authors show that the MCAS has two subscales, Knowledge/Skills and Awareness, with high internal consistency reliabilities for the Knowledge/Skills subscale and the full scale, a moderate alpha for the Awareness subscale, and moderate interscale correlations. The longer Knowledge/Skills subscale consistently discriminates among various criterion groups, such as individuals with a higher level of educational preparation in counseling, national experts, students with supervised minority clinical work, participant race, participant gender, and pretested-posttested students in multicultural counseling classes. However, score differences are not shown consistently and across various groups on the Awareness subscale. This difference in the ability of the two subscales of the MCAS to discriminate among groups may be due to (a) the difficulty in operationalizing and measuring sensitivity to issues of race, ethnicity, and culture; (b) the MCAS being a measure of formal learning; (c) the homogeneity of the various criterion groups in each study in terms of their multicultural awareness; or (d) the possibility that multicultural awareness is a stable attitude that is not trainable

8. The Multicultural Counseling Inventory: Validity And Applications In Multicultural Training

Counseling professionals in the United States (U.S.) realize that they live in a multicultural, multietlmic, and diverse socioeconomic society. The complexity of this society challenges the cOlU1selor ( counselor is used to include all psychological service providers) to revise and relearn the help-giving process. This challenge has been taken up by multicultural training (MCT). MCT\u27s challenge is professional, philosophical, and political in nature. Professional mandates of the American Association for Counseling and Development (AACD, 1988) (now called American Counseling Association [ACA]) and the American Psychological Association (APA) (APA, 1992; APA Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs, 1993) that influence lU1iversity accreditation and provide professional ethics are one reason for including MCT in master\u27s and doctoral training. There is another motivation for MCT that is less pragmatic and more implicit than professional guidelines. It is the philosophical ideology of wanting respect for differences of cultural groups and of envisioning multiculturalism as a peaceful process to co-existence in the 21st century. The third motivation has led to a political or advocacy mission that redresses the conditions of under-representation, racism, and inequity in U.S. institutions. MCT is being increasingly provided via either university course work or topic-focused continuing education workshops. Consequently, there is a need to evaluate MCT (D\u27Andrea, Daniels, & Heck, 1991; Ponterotto et al., Chapter 7 this volume; Pope-Davis, Chapter 9 this volume; Ridley, Mendoza, & Kanitz, 1994; Sodowsky & Taffe, 1991). The Multicultural Counseling Inventory (MCI) (Sodowsky, Taffe, Gutkin, & Wise, 1994a), a self-report measure, was developed for two purposes: to offer philosophical support to MCT and to present a robust instrument to measure multicultural counseling competencies, an expected outcome of MCT

Preface

Preface This work evolved from the 1993 Buros-Nebraska Symposium on Testing and Measurement: Multicultural Assessment, held by the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements, Department of Educational Psychology, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Among the symposium presenters, Stanley Sue, Juris Draguns, Guiseppe Costantino and Thomas Malgady, Janet Helms, Robert Carter, Sandra Choney and John Behrens, Joseph Ponterotto, Gargi Roysircar Sodowsky, and Donald Pope-Davis accepted the Buros Institute\u27s invitation to contribute chapters to an envisioned multicultural assessment volume. The authorssome with the assistance of new collaborators-painstakingly revised their papers. They added measurement and statistical analyses that they have not previously published, advanced the theory-building of their respective topics, and wrote integrative literature reviews, thus providing substantive chapters for this book. With reference to the few multicultural and cross-cultural assessment books, book chapters, and journal reviews that are currently available in professional psychology, this book is an essential complement to them. Its uniqueness is that it responds to the paucity of measurement research in multicultural counseling. This collection might be characterized as recording multicultural assessment\u27s empirical beginnings, a fairly unchartered territory. Select multicultural instruments that are paper-and-pencil attitude and projective tests, developed recently and cited in refereed journals, are presented. New data are treated to multivariate statistics, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, structural equation modeling, cluster analyses, reliability estimation, and norm transformations. Tests are shown to be construct-related to multicultural theories and/ or criterion- related to sociocultural variables. That is, instrument validity is supported through the theoretical groundedness of obtained results, through theory-building based on data interpretation, or through criterion predictions. Test bias of mainstream instruments are discussed statistically as well as conceptually. Differences in test scores are given an interpretation different from the conclusion that deviant scores indicate deficits. Clinical judgement is shown to be subject to individual bias and to clinicians\u27 immersion in their racial and cultural contexts and their inability to see their imposed bias. Decision trees, guidelines, and assessment reports are provided to illustrate qualitative methods for contextual diagnosis and integrative clinical judgement. Methods to identify social desirability in multicultural self-reports are discussed. Classical measurement theory is argued to overlook the multiplicity of person-environment reactivity that merits investigation in a multicultural society and in a majority-minority sociopolitical system

Experiential training in multicultural counseling: implementation and evaluation of counselor process

pt. One. Counseling multicultural training. Ch. 1. Experiential training in multicultural counseling: implementation and evaluation of counselor process / Gargi Roysircar ... et al. -- Ch. 2. Multicultural competency interventions for building positive racial identity in white counselor trainees / Daya Singh Sandhu & Eugenie Joan Looby -- Ch. 3. Walking the talk : simulations in multicultural training / Paul B. Pedersen -- Ch. 4. Engaging students in the quest for competence in multiculturalism: an expanded view of mentoring / Azara L. Santiago-Rivera & Marcia Moody -- Ch. 5. Cultural considerations in counselor training and supervision / Marie Faubert & Don C. Locke -- pt. Two. Multicultural interventions. Ch. 6. Women of color and substance abuse: a counseling model for an African American woman client / Octavia Madison-Colmore & James I. Moore III -- Ch. 7. Multicultural issues in assessment: assessment procedures with a Latina / Robert M. Davison Avilés -- Ch. 8. The power of context: counseling South Asians within a family context / Arpana G. Inman & Nita Tewari -- Ch. 9. Deconstructing Black gay shame: a multicultural perspective on the quest for a healthy ethnic and sexual identity / Ron McLean -- Ch. 10. Use of narratives, metaphor, and relationship in the assessment and treatment of a sexually reactive Native American youth / Lisa L. Frey -- Ch. 11. Multiculturalism and immigrants / Jane Uchison -- pt. Three. Multicultural practices applied to theory and setting. Ch. 12. Multicultural competencies and group work: a collectivistic view / Tarrell Awe Agahe Portman -- Ch. 13. Culture-centered counseling from an existential perspective. what does it look like and how does it work for an African American woman client? / Marcheta P. Evans & Albert A. Valadez -- Ch. 14. Including spirituality in multicultural counseling: overcoming counselor resistance / Kathy M. Evans -- Ch. 15. Applying multicultural competencies in the school setting: sexual identity of an African American adolescent / Canary C. Hogan -- Ch. 16. Culturally diverse clients in employment counseling: what do multiculturally competent counselors need to know to be effective? / S. Craig Rooney & William M. Liu -- Ch. 17. Multiculturalism in cyberspace: hypertext hyperbole or a bridge between people? / Michael D. Hawkins -- pt. Four. Multicultural organizational development. Ch. 18. Against the odds: successfully implementing multicultural counseling competencies in a counseling center on a predominantly White campus / Mary A. Fukuyama & Edward A. Delgado-Romero -- Ch. 19. Transforming college campuses: implications of the multicultural competencies guidelines / Kwong-Liem Karl Kwan & Deborah J. Taub -- Ch. 20. Applying multicultural competencies in predominantly White institutions of higher education / Patricia Arredondo -- Ch. 21. Multicultural practices in historically Black institutions: the case of Lincoln University / Queen Dunlap Fowler -- Ch. 22. Multiculturalism in the military / Jim Henderson -- Afterword. The competent practice of multicultural counseling: making it happen / Judy Lewis.https://aura.antioch.edu/facchapters/1005/thumbnail.jp