Evaluating the Change Process of Therapist Trainees’ Multicultural Competencies through Working with Refugee Clients: A Mixed-Methods Investigation

Cumulative multicultural counselling and training literature has long established the importance of therapists’ multicultural counselling competencies (MCCs), particularly when treating clients of diverse cultural backgrounds. Despite that, currently little is known about the process of how therapist trainees learn, develop, and acquire MCCs. Hence, using a mixed-method design, the present study examined the development of MCCs among 13 clinical Ph.D. student trainees through providing direct therapy services to refugee clients of diverse cultural and national backgrounds within an 8-month long supervised multicultural psychotherapy practicum course. The trainees’ written weekly critical incident reflection journals over 10 therapy sessions with their refugee clients were collected, coded, and analyzed by a team of analysts. Using a latent growth curve analysis, the study’s results show a non-linear trajectory in the growth of trainees’ MCCs over the course of therapy. In fact, the trainees’ display of culturally-marked awareness, behavioural skills, and therapeutic relationship-building increased over the sessions and peaked during the “working phase” of the therapy. However, the salience of these “cultural markers” in their reflection journals diminished in the subsequent phases of their therapy with refugee clients. The findings suggest that, over time the therapists’ attention to the more salient aspects of their refugee clients and to the cross-cultural differences between them “faded into the background” as the client-therapy therapeutic relationships grew. It is likely that, when successfully fostered, therapists’ multicultural/cultural competency might well be infused and incorporated into their general clinical competency. Hence, this study offers much-needed empirical evidence to help illuminate the unfolding process of change in therapists’ acquisition of cultural competencies at the micro-therapy level. Implications for multicultural education, training, and counselling are discussed.