culture: basic concepts

Question 1

Culture

Answer 1

The shared attitudes, values, expectations, habits, customs, and rituals of a group that are transmitted from one generation to the next and provide members with rules for living and adapting to the environment

Question 2

Multicultural Counseling

Answer 2

The awareness and incorporation into the counseling process of diverse cultural identities. All counseling can be viewed as multicultural counseling in that all helping relationships involve two or more individuals with different worldviews as a result of ethnicity, race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Often referred to as the “fourth force” in counseling.

Question 3

cultural identity

Answer 3

Derived from an individual’s sense of belonging to specific subgroups of various cultural groups or categories.

Question 4

cultural encapsulation

Answer 4

Occurs when the dominant cultural view is regarded in counseling as more important than minority values. Cultural encapsulation can lead counselors to evaluate and treat diverse clients from the dominant perspective, disregarding clients’ individual cultures and values.

Question 5

Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC)

Answer 5

four developmental domains of counselor self-awareness, counseling relationship, client worldview, and counseling and advocacy interventions. client. For the first three domains, guidelines in terms of attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, skills, and action are provided. The fourth specifies that social action should be employed at six levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, community, public policy, and international.

Question 6

etic

Answer 6

A multicultural perspective that endorses the idea of cultural neutrality and maintains that universal qualities of counseling can be generalized across cultures. Counselors who work from this perspective minimize individual cultural differences, and instead focus on basic counseling processes and strategies that can be broadly applied.

Question 7

emic

Answer 7

A multicultural perspective that maintains counseling approaches should be specific to a client’s culture. A counselor working from an emic perspective would tailor counseling approaches that are consistent with a specific client’s worldview.

Question 8

Nonverbal communication types:

Answer 8

• High/low-context communication
• Paralanguage
• Kinesics.
• Chronemics,
• Proxemics,

Question 9

High-context communication:

Answer 9

involves individuals relaying messages by relying heavily on surroundings; it is assumed that “many things can be left unsaid,” and thus nonverbal cues create social harmony.

Question 10

Low-context communication:

Answer 10

refers to individuals communicating primarily verbally to express thoughts and feelings.

Question 11

Paralanguage:

Answer 11

refers to verbal cues other than words. These may be volume, tempo, prolongation of sound, disfluencies (e.g., utterances such as uh and um), and pitch (highness or lowness of one’s voice).

Question 12

Kinesics:

Answer 12

involve postures, body movements, and positions. These might include facial expressions, eye contact and gazes, and touch.

Question 13

Chronemics:

Answer 13

how individuals conceptualize and act toward time.

Question 14

Monochromic time:

Answer 14

refers to an orientation toward time in a linear fashion (use of schedules and advanced planning of activities)

Question 15

polychromic time:

Answer 15

refers to the value of time as secondary to relationships among people.

Question 16

Proxemics:

Answer 16

the use of personal physical distance.

Question 17

The four interpersonal distance “zones”

Answer 17

intimate  distance (0 to 18 inches), 
personal distance (18 inches  to 4 feet), 
social distance (4 to 12 feet),  
public distance (12 feet or more).

Question 18

Acculturation

Answer 18

A process by which groups of individuals from differing cultures exchange cultural attributes as a result of continuously close contact. Typically, the minority group’s adoption of the dominant culture’s beliefs, values, and language; however, the dominant group can also adopt minority cultural patterns.

Question 19

four main models of acculturation:

Answer 19

assimilation, separation, integration, marginalization

Question 20

assimilation

Answer 20

A model of acculturation in which highly acculturated individuals identify solely with the new culture, so that one group adopts values and customs of another, more dominant group.

Question 21

separation

Answer 21

A model of acculturation in which individuals refuse to adapt to cultural values outside of their own cultural values

Question 22

integration

Answer 22

A model of acculturation in which individuals identify with both their own culture and the host culture

Question 23

marginalization

Answer 23

A model of acculturation in which individuals reject cultural values and customs of both cultures.

Question 24

biculturalism

Answer 24

A model of acculturation in which individuals identify with both their own culture and the host culture (also called integration).

Question 25

Worldview

Answer 25

An individual’s conceptualization of his or her relationship with the world. Two worldview models are typically incorporated into counseling programs: (a) Sue (1978) proposed that an individual’s worldview is influenced by two intersecting dimensions: locus of responsibility (i.e., who or what is accountable for events that occur in an individual’s life) and locus of control (i.e., the degree of control an individual believes he/she has over their environment); and (b) Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) maintained that individuals combine five components (i.e., human nature, relationship to nature, sense of time, activity, and social relationships) to create a unique worldview.

Question 26

locus of responsibility

Answer 26

Who or what is accountable for events that occur in an individual’s life.

Question 27

locus of control

Answer 27

The degree of control an individual believes he or she has over his or her environment.

Question 28

Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) five component worldview model:

Answer 28

• Human nature
• Relationship to nature
• Sense of time
• Activity
• Social relationships

Question 29

• Human nature:

Answer 29

involves the continuum that humans are basically good, bad, or both good and bad.

Question 30

• Relationship to nature:

Answer 30

refers to how individuals view the power of nature: harmony with nature, power over nature, or power of nature.

Question 31

• Sense of time:

Answer 31

relates to what aspect of time individuals focus upon: past, present, or future.

Question 32

• Activity:

Answer 32

is how self-expression occurs for individuals. These may include being (i.e., present-oriented with an internal focus on self), being-in-becoming (i.e., present- and future-oriented goal development to create an integrated self), and doing (i.e., actively engaging in activities that are deemed important by external standards).

Question 33

• Social relationships:

Answer 33

involve three categories that relate to the degree of hierarchy and group focus within a culture: lineal-hierarchal (i.e., traditional cultures with hierarchal positions, typically patriarchal structures), collateral-mutual (i.e., collectivistic focus), and individualistic (i.e., the needs of groups are secondary to those of individuals).