CULTURAL-IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT AND FAMILY ASSESSMENT - AN INTERACTION-MODEL

This article proposes an extension of Janet Helms's Black and White in teraction model to be used as a starting point for organizing and unde rstanding cultural-identity data in making an initial family assessmen t. A number of efforts to describe how culture affects family counseli ng have focused on between-group differences. The interaction model pr esented here endeavors to expand that discussion by systematically inc luding (a) within-group cultural differences in families, (b) changes in cultural-identity attitudes over time, (c) attention to the counsel or'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 wo rk of nondominant culture counselors working with dominant-culture fam ilies. The article reviews the Helms model and other pertinent constru cts from the literature, extends the theory to multicultural family co unseling, and concludes with some illustrative cases suggesting how th e interaction paradigm might be applied.