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Article Excerpt
The authors describe the development of the Privilege and Oppression Inventory, a measure that assesses counselors' awareness of privilege and oppression along dimensions of race, sexual orientation, religion, and gender. Initial item development as well as psychometric information derived from factor analyses, reliability estimation, and validation procedures is presented.
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Multicultural counseling competencies (MCCs) have evolved conceptually and pedagogically over the last couple of decades due to an increasing need to better serve diverse clientele (see Arredondo, 1999; Arredondo et al., 1996; Sue, Arredondo, & McDavis, 1992; Sue et al., 1982). The primary assumption of MCC is that a multicultural counseling relationship involves cross-cultural contact between a counselor of the majority group (i.e., White/European American) and a client from a minority group (i.e., racial/ethnic minority group member). In addition, a multiculturally competent counselor is one who approaches this cross-cultural interaction with satisfactory levels of awareness, knowledge, and skills to work effectively with racially/ethnically diverse clients (Sue et al., 1992). With this attention to MCC and discussion of the significance of MCC in terms of client process and outcome, there has been increased focus on assessing the effectiveness of MCC training via measurement of individual and program progress (Ponterotto, Rieger, Barrett, & Sparks, 1994).
Given the need to train and periodically assess counselors' degree of MCC, several MCC instruments are available that tap into the awareness, knowledge, and skills a counselor possesses when working within an interracial--interethnic counseling relationship. These instruments include the Cross-Cultural Counseling Inventory--Revised (LaFromboise, Coleman, & Hernandez, 1991), Multicultural Counseling Inventory (Sodowsky, Taffe, Gutkin, & Wise, 1994), Multicultural Awareness-Knowledge-and-Skills Survey (D'Andrea, Daniels, & Heck, 1991), Multicultural Counseling Knowledge and Awareness Scale (Ponterotto, Gretchen, Utsey, Rieger, & Austin, 2002; Ponterotto, Sanchez, & Magids, 1991), and Multicultural Counseling Competence and Training Survey (Holcomb-McCoy & Myers, 1999). These tools are an invaluable beginning for assessing counselors' overall competence for working with racially/ethnically diverse clients.
As MCC becomes integrated into counselor educators' conceptualization of general competency (Constantine, 2002), there has been greater attention to diverse identities beyond race and ethnicity. Specifically, the experiences of racially/ethnically diverse individuals who vary in their gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and religion need to be considered in relation to counseling process and outcome. Many individuals experience oppression based on their identities and social statuses, and, hence, they lack power, have limited access to resources and opportunities, and are targeted for physical and emotional abuse because their identities are outside dominant groups' norms. Furthermore, individuals' mental health is detrimentally influenced by their oppression experiences, which are often reflected and perpetuated in the counseling relationship (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). Thus, all facets of clients' identities should be considered within the counseling context.
As the conceptualization of "multicultural" expands, there has been an increased focus on social justice issues as a component of MCC training (Kiselica, 1999; Vera & Speight, 2003). With this focus, counselors must sufficiently assess various components of MCC, particularly awareness of privilege and oppression. Moreover, awareness of privilege and oppression attitudes significantly affects counselors' attitudes toward and interventions with various cultural groups (Hays, Dean, & Chang, 2007; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). In addition, awareness of privilege and oppression is important to attend to because an individual's level of awareness is influenced by the sociopolitical milieu, cohort effects (e.g., current sociopolitical occurrences), and historical experiences of privilege and oppression for self and others (Hays, Chang, & Dean, 2004). Thus, counselor awareness of privilege and oppression may be viewed as developmental in that level of awareness of isms may be changed and further facilitated by contemporary movements (e.g., social activism).
Ponterotto et al. (1995) initially addressed the transition in MCC training toward a social justice approach by developing the Quick Discrimination Index (QDI), an assessment tool that measures individuals' attitudes toward racism and sexism. Given the focus on social issues in counseling, additional MCC instruments are needed to meet the need to assess prejudicial beliefs and awareness of oppression. The development of the Privilege and Oppression Inventory (POI) continues to fill this void in MCC training and assessment.
The following research questions are addressed in this study: (a) What is the factor structure of the POI? (b) What is the (internal consistency and test--retest) reliability of the POI scores for the study sample of counselor trainees? (c) What is the relationship between POI score(s) and appreciation and comfort with cultural differences as measured by the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale--Short Form (M-GUDS-S; Fuertes, Miville, Mohr, Sedlacek, & Gretchen, 2000)? (d) What is the relationship between POI score(s) and racism and gender equity attitudes as measured by the QDI? and (e) What is the relationship between POI score(s) and social desirability as measured by the Marlowe--Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS; Crowne & Marlowe, 1960)?
METHOD
The initial development and validation of the POI consisted of two phases. First, we used previous procedures for development of multicultural competency scales (e.g., D'Andrea et al., 1991; LaFromboise et al., 1991; Ponterotto, Gretchen, et al., 2002; Ponterotto et al., 1991; Sodowsky et al., 1994). Along with this, we based the development of the POI on a review of the literature on MCC (e.g., Arredondo, 1999; Arredondo et al., 1996; Sue et al., 1992), multicultural assessment (Constantine & Ladany, 2001; Ponterotto et al., 1994), social advocacy (e.g., U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001; Vera & Speight, 2003), and privilege and oppression in counseling (Ancis & Szymanski, 2001). Specifically, several items of the POI represent qualitative data from individual and focus group interviews (Hays et al., 2004; Hays et al., 2007). For Phase 1, content validity, multicultural experts validated these items, and 10 participants completed the revised instrument to further ensure clarity of the items. The second phase involved reliability testing, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs), and construct validity studies of the POI's factor structure.
PHASE 1: ITEM DEVELOPMENT AND INITIAL VALIDATION
The POI is designed to measure an individual's level of awareness of social issues (i.e., privilege and oppression as it relates to four primary cultural dimensions). It allows assessment of four cultural identities separately to assist educators in noting "blind spots" in awareness of privilege and oppression for more targeted and effective multicultural training. Specifically, individuals respond to items that assess awareness of power differentials among racial, gender, sexual orientation, and religious group identities.
Initially, 107 items for the inventory were developed from a review of the multicultural counseling competency literature and data from two qualitative studies (Hays et al., 2004; Hays et al., 2007). These items are characterized along five dimensions associated with awareness of privilege and oppression around issues of race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and religion. These areas were chosen because they are the cultural categories most often addressed in the literature (e.g., counseling, psychology, education, women's studies) in relation to issues of cultural power, and because of the increased attention they have received in the field of mental health (e.g., U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001) and professional associations (e.g., American Counseling Association, American Psychological Association). To minimize the effects...
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