Goldberg Chapter 3: Diversity in Family Functioning

Question 1

What is gender-sensitive family therapy?

Answer 1

An attempt to overcome confining sex-role stereotyping by therapists in clinical interventions. The therapist needs to be attuned to the gender-role messages that clients (and therapists) grow up absorbing and to help clients (and oneself ) recognize, label, and challenge sexist-based messages.

Question 2

Why is it important that a family therapist take a client family’s cultural background into account?

Answer 2

In order to avoid pathologizing ethnic minority families whose behaviour is unfamiliar, taking care not to misdiagnose or mislabel family behaviour in the process.

Question 3

What is culture-sensitive therapy?

Answer 3

Recognizes, for example, that the White middle-class cultural outlook from which most therapists operate (prizing individual choice, self-sufficiency, independence) is not embraced by all ethnic groups with which those therapists come into contact.

Question 4

What is acculturation?

Answer 4

An ongoing process that usually occurs over multiple generations, as families confront changing gender-role expectations, child-rearing practices, intergenerational relationships, family boundaries, and so forth common in the dominant culture to which they have migrated.

Question 5

What is a multicultural outlook?

Answer 5

A multicultural outlook champions a general, culturally sensitive approach with families and urges therapists to expand their attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skills to become more culturally literate and culturally competent

Question 6

What do culturally competent therapists take into consideration about new clients?

Answer 6

Culturally competent therapists take client cultural histories into account before undertaking assessments, forming judgments, and initiating intervention procedures. They assume there is no single theory of personality applicable to all families but instead urge the adoption of a pluralistic outlook that calls for multiple perspectives rooted in and sensitive to particular cultures.

Question 7

What is the cultural context model?

Answer 7

The model uses three processes to facilitate change in therapy: (a) the development of critical consciousness, (b) a deepened sense of empowerment, and (c) accountability. These processes help in four domains of family experience: (a) conversational, (b) behavioural, (c) ritual, and (d) community building.

Question 8

What is one way to assess the impact of a family’s cultural heritage on their identity?

Answer 8

For the therapist to learn as much as possible about that specific culture before assessing the family.

Question 9

Family therapists must try to distinguish between 3 different potential family patterns (in relation to culture). What are they?

Answer 9

Family therapists must try to distinguish between a client family’s patterns that are universal (common to a wide variety of families), culture specific (common to a group, such as African Americans or Cuban Americans or perhaps lesbian families), or idiosyncratic (unique to this particular family) in their assessment of family functioning.

*A risk in assuming uniformity among families sharing a common cultural background.

Question 10

Why do therapists need to distinguish between therapists need to take care to distinguish between recently arrived immigrant families, immigrant American families (foreign-born parents, American-born or American-educated children), and immigrant-descendent families?

Answer 10

Each has a specific set of adaptational problems—economic, educational, cognitive, affective, emotional. Acculturation has been found to involve differences in each family regarding the mix of continued endorsement of the culture of origin and adoption of elements of the new host culture; family processes may mediate acculturation effects on the development of behaviour problems and depressive symptoms.

Question 11

T or F: Early family therapists operated in a gender-free fashion, as if family members were interchangeable units of a system with equal power3 and control over the outcome of interactions occurring within the family

Answer 11

True.

Question 12

When did therapists begin to challenge the gender-free ideal?

Answer 12

In the 1970s, an increasing number of family therapists, primarily women at first, began to challenge the underlying assumptions about gender that put women at a disadvantage.

Question 13

T or F: A male bias was built into family concepts that take the heterosexual, patriarchal family as the norm

Answer 13

True.

Question 14

Why do feminist-informed therapists consider such cybernetic concepts as “circular causality” unacceptable?

Answer 14

This systems-based concept implies that each participant has equal power and control in a transaction.

*Circular causality is to designate a repetitive pattern of mutually reinforcing behavior in a male–female relation- ship

Question 15

T or F: Breaking out of stereotypic male–female roles regarding domestic and work responsibilities is essential to contemporary family therapy.

Answer 15

True. Working wives continue to bear the major responsibility for child care and most household chores, although men now are more involved in the rearing of preschool children and helping with daily domestic tasks

Question 16

T or F: Since women are apt to outlive men, many may find themselves alone and financially impoverished.

Answer 16

True.

Question 17

What is being “gender sensitive”?

Answer 17

The awareness of the differences in behaviour, attitudes, and socialization experiences of growing up masculine or feminine, especially in terms of differences in power, status, position, and privilege within the family and in society in general.

Question 18

T or F: Men have been subjected to substantial role constraints and disadvantages as a result of their masculine socialization experiences

Answer 18

True. This type of gender-role restraint is inherently traumatic to men because it truncates their natural emotionality.

Question 19

One interpersonal area in which gender, asymmetrical power, and control intersect is _______ _________ and _______ _________.

Answer 19

family violence and sexual abuse.

Question 20

What is masculine discrepancy stress?

Answer 20

Perceived failure to fulfil society’s masculine gender role expectations.

*Can cause distress which results in intimate partner violence.

Question 21

What is the intention of Gender-sensitive family therapy?

Answer 21

To liberate and empower both male and female clients, enabling them to move beyond prescribed roles determined by their biological status to ones in which they can exercise choice.

Question 22

What are the characteristics of a gender-sensitive family therapist?

Answer 22

• Action oriented, not merely non- sexist in viewpoint.
• Avoid reinforcing stereotypical thinking regarding gender roles and power differentials in most male–female relationships.
• Helps clients recognize the limitations on their perceived alternatives imposed by internalizing these stereotypes.

Question 23

T or F: Most of the nation’s poor are White, although people of colour are disproportionately represented among the poor.

Answer 23

True.

Question 24

Kliman (2011) categorizes families in four ways. What are the categories?

Answer 24

ruling class, professional-managerial class, working class, and underclass

*To denote the long-term dynamics in families that extend beyond annual income

Question 25

T or F: Life cycle progression among the poor is often accelerated by teenage pregnancy.

Answer 25

True. Hines (2011) calls this the condensed life cycle because individuals become parents and grandparents at very early ages. Such early childbearing further decreases a young woman’s already limited prospects for financial security, steady job expectations, educational attainment, and marital stability.

Question 26

What is social justice?

Answer 26

The fair and equitable distribution of advantages and disadvantages within a society to all people regard- less of their status.