Carey, John C., Reinat, Maria, Fontes, Lisa (1990). School counselors’ perceptions of training needs in multicultural counseling. Counselor Education And Supervision 29, 155-169

The purpose of this study was to determine school counselors’ perceived levels of need for training in multicultural counseling. There are some difficulties in estimating these levels of need among school counselors. One of these is that there are not many significant amounts of studies on this issue because multicultural counseling has been focused on college-based and community health issues. Secondly, in the field of multicultural counseling there is no general agreement on which types of training are needed. Lastly, it seems that awareness of a need for multicultural counseling is low among counselors. The author, therefore, developed a comprehensive taxonomy of training objectives in multicultural counseling in school setting. This taxonomy was used for a needs-assessment instrument.      The survey was conducted on participants selected from members of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). This survey consisted of two parts. One was on demographic information, and the other was a training needs-assessment.   The author developed training needs-assessment items, which each participant was required to rate in terms of how important each item currently is to the counselor.     The result of the demographic part show that there was strong association with Total Scale Score ratings and participants’ characteristics (161). Hispanic and black counselors tended to rate a much higher perception of need in multicultural counseling than white counselors did. Counselors working at school in an urban setting show greater awareness for multicultural counseling than counselors working in suburban or rural setting do. Counselors dealing with children in elementary and middle school also rated higher levels of need for multicultural counseling.     For most of the counselors the top priority was to maintain students’ interests in school to prevent students from school dropout (162). At the same time, however, the counselors marked lower scores on items such as necessity of understanding sociopolitical effects of racism or multiculturalism. Overall, the study shows that most participants seem to feel the need for having some training on multicultural issue, but that was not a high priority for them.     There is a difference in priority for multicultural counseling according to the participants’ racial characteristics.  Minority group counselors rated multicultural training as a higher priority than other groups of counselors, although both minority group counselors and other counselors had the same levels of perception that multicultural counseling is important for multiracial students.

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