COMPONENTS OF CULTURAL COMPETENCE AND ITS RELEVANCE TO SOCIAL SERVICE PRACTICE Flashcards
What are the four COMPONENTS / ATTRIBUTES / ELEMENTS of Cultural Competency?
- Be aware of one’s own assumptions, values, and biases about human behaviour
- Understand the worldview of culturally diverse clients
- Develop appropriate intervention strategies and techniques
- Understand organisational and institutional forces that enhance or negate cultural competence.
Explain 1. Be aware of one’s own assumptions, values, and biases about human behaviour in the four COMPONENTS / ATTRIBUTES / ELEMENTS of Cultural Competency.
As a (social) worker: • What stereotypes, perceptions, and beliefs do you personally and professionally hold about culturally diverse groups that may hinder your ability to form a helpful and effective relationship? • What are the worldviews you bring to the interpersonal encounter, and how do you define problem solving?
• What value systems are inherent in your professional theory of helping, community work, educating, administrating, and what values underlie the strategies and techniques used in these situations?
Without an awareness and understanding of your worldview you may inadvertently assume that all groups share it.
When this happens, you may inadvertently impose your definitions of reality, right and wrong, good and bad, or normal and abnormal on your culturally diverse clients.
Training programs stress the importance of not allowing your biases and values to interfere with the ability to work with clients and client systems. In most cases, this approach stays primarily on an intellectual level, and less directed at having trainees get in touch with their own values and biases about human behaviour. It always seems easier to deal with one’s cognitive understanding about their own cultural heritage, the values they hold about human behaviour, their standards for judging normality and abnormality, and the culture-bound goals toward which they strive than the disturbing affective and embedded assumptions that may oppress or discriminate others.
What makes examination of the ‘self’ difficult is the emotional impact of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings associated with cultural differences.
D. W. Sue suggested that to be adequately culturally competent, one has to deal with the questions and worked through the biases, feelings, fears, and guilt associated with them.
Explain 2. Understand the worldview of culturally diverse clients in the four COMPONENTS / ATTRIBUTES / ELEMENTS of Cultural Competency.
Among the diverse groups, there are many commonalities shared by all but there are also differences, as research strongly supports that worldviews are strongly shaped by group membership. It has become increasingly clear that persons from the minority group hold worldviews that differ from those of members of the other dominant culture. There are many factors that influence worldview such as race, gender, and sexual orientation etc. For example, do women see the world differently than men? Do gays/lesbians see the world differently than straights?
Worldview: is ‘the way you frame the world and what it means to you,” or “how you think the world works.” It is “our philosophy of life, or “our experience within social, cultural, environmental, philosophical, and psychological dimensions.” In other words, it is about how a person perceives his or her relationship to the world (nature, institutions, other people, etc.) and worldviews are highly correlated with a person’s upbringing and life experiences.
Worldviews are not only composed of our attitudes, values, opinions and concepts, but they may also affect how we think, define events, make decisions and behave.
Thus, it is important that social workers are able to understand and share the worldview of their culturally different clients. It does not mean that providers must hold these worldviews as their own, but rather that they should see and accept other worldviews in a non-judgemental manner, also referred to as cultural role taking.
It is almost impossible for the culturally different person to think, feel and react to the client’s experience but to have cognitive empathy, as distinct from affective, may be possible.
The Multicultural Social Work practice emphasise on the need to acquire practical knowledge concerning the scope and nature of client’s cultural background, living experiences, hopes, fears and aspirations. Inherent in cognitive empathy is the understanding of how social services relate to the wider socio-political system with which the clients contend with every day of their lives.
Explain 3. Understand the worldview of culturally diverse clients in the four COMPONENTS / ATTRIBUTES / ELEMENTS of Cultural Competency.
Social workers must initiate the process of developing appropriate and effective helping, teaching, communication, and intervention strategies in working with culturally diverse groups and individuals.
It is important that social workers have the ability to make use of indigenous helping/healing approaches and current structures existing in the minority community, built on the strengths of a community and to empower them in their ability to help themselves.
Social worker should use intervention modalities and defines goals that are consistent with the life experiences and cultural values of clients.
Social works must not assume that clients share a similar background and cultural heritage and that the same approaches are equally effective with all clients.
As groups and individuals differ from one another, the blind application of techniques and strategies to all situations and all populations seems ridiculous. The interpersonal transactions between the social worker and client require differential approaches that are consistent with the person’s life experiences.
It is ironic that equal treatment in clinical work may be discriminatory treatment! Clinical social workers need to understand this important point. As a means to prove discriminatory mental health practices, racial/ethnic minority groups have in the past pointed to studies revealing that minority clients are given less preferential forms of treatment (medication, electroconvulsive therapy, etc.). Somewhere, confusion has occurred, and it came to be believed that to akin to be treated differently is discrimination. The confusion centred on the distinction between equal access or opportunities and equal treatment. Marginalised and oppressed groups may not be asking for equal treatment so much as they are asking for equal access and opportunities. This dictates differential approach that is truly non-discriminatory.
Explain 4. Understand organisational and institutional forces that enhance or negate cultural competence.in the four COMPONENTS / ATTRIBUTES / ELEMENTS of Cultural Competency.
If society truly is to value diversity and to become multicultural, organisations (mental health care delivery systems, businesses, schools, universities, governmental agencies, and even professional organizations) must move towards becoming multi-cultural.
Social workers must understand how institutional forces may enhance or negate cultural competence. In some ways, they must become increasingly skilled as organizational change agents and understand multicultural organisational development.
Multicultural organizational work is based on the premise that organisations vary in their awareness of how racial, cultural, ethnic, sexual orientation, and gender-issues impact their clients or workers. Institutions that recognise and value diversity in a pluralistic society will be in a better position to avoid many of the misunderstandings and conflicts characteristics of mono-cultural organisation.
Multicultural organization professionals would be in a better position to engage in organizationally sanctioned roles and activities without the threat of punishment. Moving from a monoculture to a multicultural organizational multi-cultural organization requires the counselor or change agent to understand their characteristics. It is crucial to ascertain what the organizational culture is like, what policies or practices either facilitate or impede cultural diversity, and how to implement change.
