Cultural Issues in Couples and Families

This entry explains how issues involving culture and cultural identities surface in couples and families, and discusses the implications for counselors. To understand how cultural issues operate in couples and families, it is important to become familiar with some commonly used terms. The word culture refers to the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and values of a particular social group or community. An individual’s cultural identity is shaped by that person’s membership in these various social communities. Cultural communities, or groups, include but are not limited to people who share attributes based on geographic location, level of education, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, age, political affiliation, disability status, sexual identity, ethnicity, and race. Thus, a person’s cultural identity is an intersection of multiple memberships in a range of ...