Intercultural Counselling and Assessment: Global Perspectives

Marshall Fine was Assistant Professor of Family Studies, University of Guelph, Ontario.

A book on intercultural counselling is certainly a welcome sight for the many professionals dealing with the increasingly divergent cultural groups and influences in our society.

The book is divided into six parts, each dealing with a specific aspect of the multicultural counselling and assessment topic. Part one provides the philosophical and theoretical frameworks for exploring intercultural counselling. The second part covers broad intercultural counselling perspectives from four different countries — United States, Britain, West Germany, and Australia. Part three uncovers the problems of the use of various assessment measures with minorities and how the misuse of measures can lead to inappropriate school and employment placements. The fourth part explores counselling issues with specific ethnic and cultural groups: West Indians, South Asians, Native Canadians, Chinese, and European immigrants. Part five looks at the counselling of minorities within specific environments such as in higher education, employment, and correctional institutions. The final part deals with intercultural counselling and assessment training programs.

I have mixed thoughts regarding the book. On the positive side, the book raises some very important issues with respect to the use of assessment measures and counselling information with ethnic minorities. In addition, it offers some very good and enjoyable descriptions of the customs, attitudes, and mannerisms of various ethnic groups. Such information is quite useful to counsellors.

On the less positive side, there is a fair amount of repetition of ideas, which may be inevitable for edited books of this nature, and for the state of knowledge now available on intercultural counselling. Nonetheless, the repetition is occasionally annoying. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the book is that the actual counselling issues are in most cases almost presented as afterthoughts. Many opportunities are lost to investigate very specific counselling details, rather than the more general “you might want to keep these points in mind when you are counselling this ethnic group.”

In summary, this is a useful book providing important idiosyncratic information on some ethnic and minority populations. A number of key training and assessment issues are also raised. The book is not strong, however, in offering specific counselling procedures and techniques that would be useful to counsellors working with minorities.