Cultural and Social Justice Counseling

This volume provides guidelines for assessment of cultural identity, worldview, acculturation status and provides information on other specific assessment tools that can be used to clarify racial identity, gender identity, LGBTQ identity development, specific acculturation assessment tools and social justice concerns such as privilege and oppression issues. The text also provides a model for immigrant and refugee identity development in host culture. Increasing cultural awareness, and knowledge is an important aspect of most of the work, however, they do not provide tools for students and clinicians to provide culture and client-specific interventions. The book addresses these issues that have been mostly overlooked, leaving the practitioner to fall back on their biases about culture, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, religions and social class issues. Along with the assessment guidelines, the text includes the following tools to aid in cultural assessments: Cultural Identity Check List-Revised© (Ibrahim, 2008), The Scale to Assess World View© (Ibrahim & Kahn, 1984) and The US Acculturation Index© (Ibrahim, 2007). Further, case studies are included to show how the assessment data is used to develop intervention plans, along with evaluation of the interventions. All these aspects make this a user friendly volume and informative text for practitioners and students in the field of counseling and psychotherapy and useful for professionals supervising internships, practica and staff, in a variety of mental health setting.