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Clinical judgment faith bias : the impact of faith and multicultural competence on clinical judgment

Clinical judgment faith bias is a hypothesized tendency for clinicians to make more pathological judgments for clients with socially nonnormative faith than for otherwise identical clients with socially normative faith. To test for clinical judgment faith bias, Dillman’s (2007) Tailored Design method for mail and internet surveys was employed. A random sample of 141 psychologists in clinical practice completed a series of questionnaires measuring clinician religiousness and spirituality, view of faith helpfulness, multicultural awareness and knowledge, and diagnostic and prognostic judgments of a clinical vignette describing a client with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and two manipulated attributes: magnitude of faith (low, moderate, or high) and type of faith (religious or spiritual). Five multivariate multiple regression analyses were conducted, with a series of follow-up multivariate tests. The results of the analyses were not significant. The magnitude of faith in the vignette did not influence the diagnostic or prognostic judgments of clinicians, clinicians did not make significantly different judgments for religious cases than for spiritual cases, and faith magnitude did not interact with faith type. Furthermore, clinician attributes did not appear to affect clinical judgments in any way. Implications are discussed for theory, research and clinical practice. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:123456789/194703
Date06 July 2011
CreatorsHarris, Kevin A.
ContributorsSpengler, Paul M.
Source SetsBall State University
Detected LanguageEnglish

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