Multicultural assessMent: individual and contextual dynaMic sizing

Multicultural assessment is a series of decisions— the first of which is whether to use an emic (groupspecific) or etic (nomothetic) lens (Draguns, 1996). However, at the onset of assessment, considering how a client would relate to assessment is important because people in certain minority cultures in which testing is not common or where test data have been used against them are distrustful of structured and semistructured assessment tools. So as clients, minority individuals may only obligingly respond, and the clinician will not get accurate information. In these cases, assessment must be conducted within the narrative structure of what is familiar to the client. Ideally, the clinician should use both emic and etic lenses to provide a more complete picture of the individual being assessed (Draguns, 1996). This means exploring how the client’s perceptions, mores, and behaviors are similar to and different from those of the client’s minority culture as well as those of the dominant culture. Just as important, the clinician simultaneously understands the client as an individual who cannot be confined to minority– majority contextual variables. The clinician, thus, uses dynamic sizing (Sue, 1998), which is being able to individualize and generalize a client’s issues in the assessment and treatment processes. Ridley, Hill, Thompson, and Omerod (2001) explained that to view the client as an individual, the clinician looks for the intersection of the client’s various cultural contexts. Within these intersections of contexts, the client develops multiple identities (Roysircar, Dobbins, & Malloy, 2009). Some identities (e.g., Sex × Ethnicity or Race) may be more visible than others (e.g., Sex × Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Orientation or Feminism). So the clinician responds to both explicit and implicit cultural identities of clients as well as the client’s silent stigmatization of certain identities he or she owns. Regardless of how apparent or invisible a culture presents itself, everyone is influenced by their cultural identities, and it is important for the clinician to consider these identities in professional practice (American Psychological Association [APA], 2003). Culture refers to the values, beliefs, and customs transmitted throughout generations in a group of people (APA, 2003). Culture, a socially constructed phenomenon, remains important in the assessment process because its members may endorse, for example, a worldview of individualism or collectivism or both (Frey & Roysircar, 2004). On a related note, clients may come from a culture that has beliefs contrasting with those of Western ideology. One’s enculturation in a heritage culture can affect the duration, course, and outcome of a mental illness, which includes the meaning and manifestation of symptoms (Kress, Eriksen, Rayle, & Ford, 2005). APA’s Taskforce on Evidence-Based Practice (APA, 2006) asserted that when working with any population, it is crucial to be attentive to the characteristics of the population; an example of this would be having knowledge of base rates of depression in a particular minority population in the United States. Depression may be related to capital resources available to an adolescent client and his or her family. Capital resources, different