A Cultural Accommodation Approach to Career Assessment with Asian Americans

Abstract

This chapter will present a cultural accommodation approach to address the emerging need for better theoretical models to guide career assessment with culturally diverse populations. Based on a recent integrative model of cross-cultural counseling and psychotherapy proposed by Leong (1996), this cultural accommodation approach is flexible and can be applied to enrich existing career theories which are primarily Eurocentric. The chapter will have three sections: 1) introduction of the cultural accommodation approach; 2) brief literature review on the career development and assessment of Asian Americans; and 3) illustration of how this cultural accommodation model can be applied to guide career assessment research and practice with Asian Americans. We should point out that we will be using the term “cross-cultural” in the broadest sense throughout this chapter and the related terms of cross-racial, cross-ethnic, and cross-national are subsumed under cross-cultural in our usage.