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Friday 24 February 2023

Cultural identity in career practice

As practitioners, it is immensely helpful in our career practice to consider our client’s cultural identification. However, it is important to note that a client's apparent ethnicity does not dictate our assumptions of personal cultural origin, ethnicity, or identity (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1987; Te Rito, 2007a; Ward & Bingham, 1993). Just because a client does or doesn’t 'look' Māori, that doesn’t mean that they do or don’t identify as Māori. We must ask. 

In asking, we could use the five steps of the Multicultural Career Counseling Checklist (Ward & Bingham, 1993) to help us to better determine our client's needs, by taking the client's own context into account. The five steps are: 

  • Am I aware of my client’s cultural identification? 
  • Do I know of many of the strengths of client’s culture? 
  • What is my own cultural identity? 
  • Do I understand and respect my client’s culture? 
  • And what do I know of my client’s cultural group history and issues and their attitude towards seeking help?

However, these elements lack cultural alignment with Aotearoa New Zealand. What we could do instead is to combine the five steps of the Multicultural Career Counseling Checklist model (Ward & Bingham, 1993) with roles, identities, and cultural identification concepts (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1987), then use the context and language relevant to New Zealand (Te Rito, 2007). This creates a set of questions and areas which may be more relevant for our clients:

  1. Whakapapa. Firstly, we can engage with a client through asking about their whakapapa ("a genealogical narrative" of ancestry from past to present; Te Rito, 2007, p. 1), if they know it (Ward & Bingham, 1993). 
  2. Whānau origins. Depending on the answer to the client’s whakapapa, we can ask if they immigrated to New Zealand or if their Whānau were born in Aotearoa. If they are migrants, where did they come from? What were their circumstances in coming to New Zealand? (Massey University, 2018; Te Rito, 2007).
  3. Whānau identity. Our sense of identity can be defined as  how clients may "attribute ethnocultural characteristics" to themselves or to the practitioner (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1987, p. 236). We need to know what the likely family attributions may be, so we must ask. What is the Whānau cultural identity? Has the Whānau cultural identity stayed constant or changed? Be open to Whānau potentially having a different cultural identity to the client; there may be generational change if Whānau migrated to New Zealand  (Te Rito, 2007).
  4. Personal client identity. Compare the Whānau identity to the way the client describes their own cultural identity. What differences are noted? How comfortable are they with seeking help? Where does help become 'uncomfortable'? How are decisions made? (Te Rito, 2007; Ward & Bingham, 1993).
  5. Compare to practitioner. Finally, we can compare our client’s cultural identity to our own (Ward & Bingham, 1993). This last step can be critical to our understanding of the cultural expectations that the client is facing, our "complementary identification"; as is the client's "degree of identification with the [practitioner]" (Comas-Diaz & Jacobsen, 1987, p. 236).

It is easy to see that this may not be a fast process. But it is worthwhile; building cross-cultural understanding, sensitivity, and self-knowledge for all participants.


Jordan

References:

Comas-Diaz, L., & Jacobsen, F. M. (1987). Ethnocultural identification in psychotherapy. Psychiatry, 50(3), 232-241. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1987.11024355

Massey University. (2018). A brief introduction to Te Ara Tika. Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa. https://www.massey.ac.nz/documents/365/Te_Ara_Tika_summary.pdf Massey University - Te Ara Tika summary, 2018.pdf

Te Rito, J. S. (2007b). Whakapapa: A framework for understanding identity. MAI Review LW, 1(3), 1-10. http://www.review.mai.ac.nz/mrindex/MR/article/download/56/56-65-1-PB.pdf

Ward, C. M., & Bingham, R. P. (1993). Career assessment of ethnic minority women. Journal of Career Assessment, 1(3), 246-257. https://doi.org/10.1177/106907279300100304

* Jordan Brannigan has kindly prepared much of the material used in this post

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