Cultural-Identity Development and Family Assessment

Abstract

This article proposes an extension of Janet Helms's Black and White interaction model to be used as a starting point for organizing and understanding cultural-identity data in mating an initial family assessment. A number of efforts to describe how culture affects family counseling have focused on between-group differences. The interaction model presented here endeavors to expand that discussion by systematically including (a) within-group cultural differences in families, (b) changes in cultural-identity attitudes over time, (c) attention to the counselor's stage of cultural identity (in addition to those of the family's various subsystems), and (d) consideration of cultural differences in the work of counselors and families from the same culture or in the work of nondominant culture counselors working with dominant-culture families. The article reviews the Helms model and other pertinent constructs from the literature, extends the theory to multicultural family counseling, and concludes with some illustrative cases suggesting how the interaction paradigm might be applied.