This year, fewer than 20 percent of new full-time students in more than 700 psychology graduate programs are ethnic minorities, according to data collected by APA s Research Office. And only about 9 percent of the full-time faculty in graduate psychology programs are members of minority groups, the Research Office has found in its annual faculty salary survey. Some students have said to me I m the first minority instructor they ve had. Despite the recruitment problem, psychology has made earnest steps to prepare for the changing demographic landscape. Multicultural courses have become common in graduate programs.
Journals devote increasing space to articles on ethnic-minority research and clinical concerns.
And in 1997, an APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training in Psychology recommended that the profession beef up its efforts to improve multicultural education in psychology and recruit ethnic minorities into the profession. But while the efforts may be noble, they ve often been poorly executed, critics in the profession say. Educated gay men may pay attention to advertisements promoting condom use. Wyatt for 25 years has studied sociocultural factors in sexual decision-making. For example, a practitioner may misinterpret a Puerto Rican patient s behavior as passive and resistant to treatment, rather than understanding it as a culturally based deference to authority, says Christine Iijima Hall, PhD, of Glendale Community College in Arizona.