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Article Excerpt
The study of gender and racial-ethnic diversity has been growing steadily and has paralleled the increased demographic diversity of the United States (Harvey, 2002; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001). Increased diversity is generally held to be a positive development, but some research indicates that racial-ethnicity hostility and distress is also growing in U.S. society in general and on college campuses (Grieger & Toliver, 2001; Office of the Surgeon General, 2000; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 2001).
Numerous studies support the idea that there are differences in diversity perspectives by race-ethnicity and gender (Ancis, Sedlacek, & Mohr, 2000; Fisher & Hartmann, 1995). For example, on campuses that are predominantly Anglo-American, students of color are more concerned about racial-ethnic relations than are Anglo-American students because their minority status directly affects their life (Fisher & Hartmann, 1995). Data from many campus climate studies show that students of color have more negative campus experiences (Ancis et al., 2000), feel greater sociocultural alienation (Mack et al., 1997), experience the campus social climate as less friendly (Grieger & Toliver, 2001), and have a lower level of satisfaction with campus life (Fisher & Hartmann, 1995; Student Affairs Research Services, 1994) than Anglo-American students. Similarly, because they generally perceive race-ethnicity as more salient to their life both on campus and off, the association between diversity attitudes and quality of interactions (behaviors) with racially dissimilar people may be stronger for students of color.
Considerable research and numerous theories point to the importance of designing diversity programming and counseling interventions that target men, women, and specific racial groups, rather than attempting to assume that all people would benefit from the same type of programming (Ancis et al., 2000; Helm, Sedlacek, & Prieto, 1998; McTighe Musil et al., 1999). As is the case with people of color, women in the United States are often considered to be more sensitive to multiculturalism because of their own experience of being marginalized in an Anglo-American, male-dominated society. Research on gender differences has indicated that women are more likely than men to have liberal multicultural attitudes (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, & Krysan, 1997; Springer, Palmer, Terenzini, Pasearella, & Nora, 1996). Therefore, it seems appropriate to address how men and women from various racial-ethnic groups experience diversity.
Prejudice is generally understood to be a negative attitude regarding a particular group and has been shown to influence a person's interactions with people from that group (Baron & Byrne, 1994). Although prejudice is very commonly addressed in campus climate studies, it is both conceptually and methodologically difficult to measure the amount of prejudice a given person has toward a large number of groups (e.g., African Americans, men, lawyers). Alternately, it is useful to examine a person's level of appreciation and acceptance of people and cultures that are different from her or his own. Miville et al. (1999) found that people who appreciated groups different from their own (a universal-diverse orientation) had low levels of prejudice (e.g., homophobia and dogmatism) and high levels of empathy. This finding indicates that a person's attitudes regarding diversity is strongly related to the quality of her or his interactions with culturally dissimilar people.
As defined in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Pickett et al., 2000), the term diversity generally applies to a heterogeneous quality indicative of a noticeable difference among elements of some group. When applied to diversity in a group of people or in society, this term essentially reflects a difference in social identities such as race-ethnicity, class, gender, sexual/affectional orientation, religion, language abilities, and/or age (Reynolds, 2001). Multiculturalism has been defined as a worldview aimed at "raising our awareness of our cultural assumptions about ourselves and the world" (Reynolds, 2001, p. 104). From this perspective, the idea of being oriented toward diversity indicates a multicultural outlook in that it suggests an active movement toward, and appreciation of, diversity.
The concept of universal-diverse orientation (UDO) may provide an important new direction for assessment in multicultural counseling and diversity programming (Fuertes, Sedlacek, et al., 2000; Miville et al., 1999). Rather than simply the presence or absence of prejudice, UDO is the movement toward or away from diversity. By considering UDO, practitioners and researchers may be able to use a higher order construct as the basis for creating multicultural programs. This construct is measured by the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale-Short Form (MGUDS-S; Fuertes, Miville, et al., 2000), which consists of three subscales that tap cognitive, behavioral, and affective aspects of diversity perceptions, respectively: Relativistic Appreciation, Diversity of Contact, Comfort with Differences
Together, these three subscales yield an MGUDS-S full scale score that indicates an overall orientation toward diversity. The MGUDS-S assessment instrument has been shown to be correlated with numerous aspects of students' functioning, including past academic achievement (Singley & Sedlacek, 2004) and life satisfaction (Sheu, Sedlacek, & Singley, 2003).
Sheu et al. (2003) hypothesized that socioeconomic status, UDO, and perceptions of adjustment would significantly predict life satisfaction for Anglo-Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the mediating effects of college adjustment and UDO on the relationship between socioeconomic status and life satisfaction were supported only for Anglo-American students. This finding suggests that attitudes toward diversity may play a different role in life satisfaction for Anglo-Americans than for people of color.
Fuertes, Sedlacek, Roger, and Mohr (2000) compared racial-ethnic groups (Anglo-Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans), expecting to find that members of racial and ethnic minority groups would have higher levels of UDO. However, no statistically significant differences were found between groups' MGUDS-S full scale scores. The Diversity of Contact subscale was the only subscale to show a significant difference between groups. Pairwise comparisons showed that Asian American students had higher scores than Anglo-American students on this subscale. Given that the number of students in the groups of color was somewhat small, it seems likely that the lack...
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