Thesis advisor: Janet E. Helms / Training racial/ethnic minorities, or people of Color (POC), to provide culturally competent mental health care has gained increasing significance in counselor education and applied psychology programs in the past 30 years. From a developmental perspective, race may be the most salient psychosocial lens through which POC trainees perceive and experience professional training; multicultural supervision might be the primary mode for developing their cultural competence. However, supervision may not sufficiently attend to POC trainees' race-related characteristics. To better understand the possible influence of POC trainees' racial psychosocial development and experiences of multicultural supervision on their competence in counseling clients of Color, the present study examined relationships among POC trainees' racial identity attitudes, perceptions of multicultural supervision, and self-reported multicultural counseling competencies. POC trainees (N = 203) from clinical, counseling, and school psychology programs, who had completed at least one semester of therapy supervision, completed a sociodemographic questionnaire, the People of Color Racial Identity Attitudes Scale (Helms, 2011), the Multicultural Supervision Competencies Questionnaire (Wong & Wong, 1999), and the Multicultural Counseling Inventory (Sodowsky et al., 1994). Canonical correlation and regression analyses were used to investigate relationships among the variables. The canonical correlation analyses revealed three statistically significant patterns: (a) "Competent Internalization," wherein trainees reported positive relationships between self-actualizing racial identity attitudes (i.e., Internalization) and multicultural counseling competencies; (b) "Racially Ambivalent Relationships" characterized trainees endorsing low levels of Dissonant and Immersion/Resistance racial identity and increased competence in managing racial/cultural dynamics in counseling relationships; and (c) "Supervision Incompetence," characterized by POC trainees rating supervisors' cultural competence and their own multicultural knowledge, awareness, and skills competencies as low. Two multiple regression analyses indicated that only Internalization racial identity attitudes uniquely contributed to predicting trainees' perceptions of supervisors' cultural competence. Results were discussed with respect to how supervisors might utilize Helms's (1995) racial identity theory in multicultural supervision to assess and promote racial identity development and enhanced multicultural counseling competencies. Methodological limitations of the study and implications for research and practice are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_101420 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Green, Carlton Everett |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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