culture: basic concepts Flashcards
Culture
The shared attitudes, values, expectations, habits, customs, and rituals of a group that are transmitted from one generation to the next and provide members with rules for living and adapting to the environment
Multicultural Counseling
The awareness and incorporation into the counseling process of diverse cultural identities. All counseling can be viewed as multicultural counseling in that all helping relationships involve two or more individuals with different worldviews as a result of ethnicity, race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Often referred to as the “fourth force” in counseling.
cultural identity
Derived from an individual’s sense of belonging to specific subgroups of various cultural groups or categories.
cultural encapsulation
Occurs when the dominant cultural view is regarded in counseling as more important than minority values. Cultural encapsulation can lead counselors to evaluate and treat diverse clients from the dominant perspective, disregarding clients’ individual cultures and values.
Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC)
four developmental domains of counselor self-awareness, counseling relationship, client worldview, and counseling and advocacy interventions. client. For the first three domains, guidelines in terms of attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, skills, and action are provided. The fourth specifies that social action should be employed at six levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community, public policy, and international.
etic
A multicultural perspective that endorses the idea of cultural neutrality and maintains that universal qualities of counseling can be generalized across cultures. Counselors who work from this perspective minimize individual cultural differences, and instead focus on basic counseling processes and strategies that can be broadly applied.
emic
A multicultural perspective that maintains counseling approaches should be specific to a client’s culture. A counselor working from an emic perspective would tailor counseling approaches that are consistent with a specific client’s worldview.
Nonverbal communication types:
- High/low-context communication
- Paralanguage
- Kinesics.
- Chronemics,
- Proxemics,
High-context communication:
involves individuals relaying messages by relying heavily on surroundings; it is assumed that “many things can be left unsaid,” and thus nonverbal cues create social harmony.
Low-context communication:
refers to individuals communicating primarily verbally to express thoughts and feelings.
Paralanguage:
refers to verbal cues other than words. These may be volume, tempo, prolongation of sound, disfluencies (e.g., utterances such as uh and um), and pitch (highness or lowness of one’s voice).
Kinesics:
involve postures, body movements, and positions. These might include facial expressions, eye contact and gazes, and touch.
Chronemics:
how individuals conceptualize and act toward time.
Monochromic time:
refers to an orientation toward time in a linear fashion (use of schedules and advanced planning of activities)
polychromic time:
refers to the value of time as secondary to relationships among people.
Proxemics:
the use of personal physical distance.
The four interpersonal distance “zones”
intimate distance (0 to 18 inches), personal distance (18 inches to 4 feet), social distance (4 to 12 feet), public distance (12 feet or more).
Acculturation
A process by which groups of individuals from differing cultures exchange cultural attributes as a result of continuously close contact. Typically, the minority group’s adoption of the dominant culture’s beliefs, values, and language; however, the dominant group can also adopt minority cultural patterns.
four main models of acculturation:
assimilation, separation, integration, marginalization
assimilation
A model of acculturation in which highly acculturated individuals identify solely with the new culture, so that one group adopts values and customs of another, more dominant group.
separation
A model of acculturation in which individuals refuse to adapt to cultural values outside of their own cultural values
integration
A model of acculturation in which individuals identify with both their own culture and the host culture
marginalization
A model of acculturation in which individuals reject cultural values and customs of both cultures.
biculturalism
A model of acculturation in which individuals identify with both their own culture and the host culture (also called integration).
Worldview
An individual’s conceptualization of his or her relationship with the world. Two worldview models are typically incorporated into counseling programs: (a) Sue (1978) proposed that an individual’s worldview is influenced by two intersecting dimensions: locus of responsibility (i.e., who or what is accountable for events that occur in an individual’s life) and locus of control (i.e., the degree of control an individual believes he/she has over their environment); and (b) Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) maintained that individuals combine five components (i.e., human nature, relationship to nature, sense of time, activity, and social relationships) to create a unique worldview.
locus of responsibility
Who or what is accountable for events that occur in an individual’s life.
locus of control
The degree of control an individual believes he or she has over his or her environment.
Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) five component worldview model:
- Human nature
- Relationship to nature
- Sense of time
- Activity
- Social relationships
• Human nature:
involves the continuum that humans are basically good, bad, or both good and bad.
• Relationship to nature:
refers to how individuals view the power of nature: harmony with nature, power over nature, or power of nature.
• Sense of time:
relates to what aspect of time individuals focus upon: past, present, or future.
• Activity:
is how self-expression occurs for individuals. These may include being (i.e., present-oriented with an internal focus on self), being-in-becoming (i.e., present- and future-oriented goal development to create an integrated self), and doing (i.e., actively engaging in activities that are deemed important by external standards).
• Social relationships:
involve three categories that relate to the degree of hierarchy and group focus within a culture: lineal-hierarchal (i.e., traditional cultures with hierarchal positions, typically patriarchal structures), collateral-mutual (i.e., collectivistic focus), and individualistic (i.e., the needs of groups are secondary to those of individuals).
