Since refugee and forced migration experiences are marked by experiences of displacement, exile and resettlement, family therapy with child or youth patients from these families often encompasses complex dynamics and contexts. Each family member may present unique intra-generational, developmental, systemic experiences and individual narratives while the family adapts and copes within collective, familial and individual acculturation realities. By engaging with cultural hybridization and dynamics of identity, family therapists’ interventions often address resilience promotion as well as child protection issues. In addition, since advocacy and institutional collaboration remain common frameworks of care, therapeutic spaces would benefit from using cultural safety and cultural axis parameters in shaping intervention strategies with the refugee family. Engagement of these refugees and displaced migrant families is supported by considering multiple perspectives within each family and also within the therapists themselves or the teams who are involved in clinical mandates. This chapter uses case vignettes to illustrate some family cases.

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.