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3 - Multicultural Issues in Clinical Psychological Assessment

from Part I - General Issues in Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2019

By
Frederick T. L. Leong ,
P. Priscilla Lui  and
Zornitsa Kalibatseva
Edited by
Martin Sellbom  and
Julie A. Suhr
Martin Sellbom
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
Julie A. Suhr
Affiliation:
Ohio University
Get access

Summary

This chapter provides a discussion of multicultural issues in clinical psychological assessment. The first two sections discuss best practice–related issues in assessment in relation to (1) clinical diagnosis and (2) psychological testing and assessment. For example, in terms of clinical diagnosis, the Cultural Formulation approach in DSM-5 represents the current major framework for conducting diagnosis with culturally diverse patients. At the same time, we also highlight the importance of cultural threats to validity. In the third and final section, we discuss the remaining challenges and the future directions related to multicultural issues in clinical psychological assessment. These challenges include the evaluation of cultural validity and measurement invariance of our psychological tests and measures. Future directions for the field involve achieving greater representation and generalizability in light of the WEIRD sample bias, that is, most of the psychological research has been conducted in Western Industrialized Rich Democracies.

Keywords

Multicultural assessmentcultural formulationcultural validitythreats to validity
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis , pp. 25 - 37
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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