Brain Drain - Hochschule der Bundesagentur für Arbeit

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4 "Increase opportunities for an exchange of information between those with
quantitative training in instrument development and those with an interest
and expertise in multicultural issues." Currently there is little overlap in these
two groups. Helms (1992) felt it was important not to assume that there are
enough professionals of colour to do this work. Many individuals from majority
racial and cultural groups will need to develop such measures as well.
Conventions, workshops, co-authored articles, and curricular reform in graduate
programs are but a few examples of what could be done.
After everything said so far we will quote Brown and Brooks (1990, p. 172) who see
the alternative for assessment in counselling in using informal diagnostic methods.
The reliability of these tests is strongly dependent on the mutual trust and the
possible culture stereotypes of the counsellor. Prejudice and biased interpretation
may be also very influential. If the requirements and conditions for using informal
methodologies are kept they can give an essential direction of the counsellor’s work.
The possibility of avoiding cultural context when using informal methodologies
originates from the facts that:
• the requirement in implementing them are not strict and the BD- BG counsellor
can explain and answer the client’s questions at any time
• good knowledge of ethnos and culture specifics of the client can help the BD-BG
counsellor in applying cases, giving exercises for ability measurements, lists of
interests, qualities, skills, etc. as well as to comply the interpretation of the results
with the cultural specifics of the client.
Among the mostly used instruments for assessment of representatives of different
ethnical groups are:
• Work samples
• Picture tools
• Computer applications
• Visualisation
To summarize we can point out the following conclusions:
Assessment is an important stage of the counselling process. Many different
methods for ability measurements and interest assessments are created and
generally divided into formal and informal. Both types of methodologies implemented
in multicultural context will lead to a distortion of the results and specific interpretation
because the behavioural model of the clients and the obstacles they face differ in
accordance with their background culture.
Although the multicultural context theme for ability measurements and interest
assessments is more often discussed in counselling, the development of
standardised test to be used in multicultural context is still an issue needing further
development.
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