International Developments, Counseling

Globalization

Current growth within the field has, by and large, been fostered by the rapid and expansive impact of economic and technological globalization. This expansion is of particular interest at present, as the impact of globalization transforms both personal and professional roles in a variety of cultural arenas. The potential benefits of increasing the international scope of counseling psychology are myriad and include creating a worldwide forum for examining whether accepted traditional psychological paradigms and practices are generalizable to other cultures. Globalization also allows for an expansion of our current understanding of human strengths and resiliency as they relate to cultural context and provides a much-needed opportunity for incorporating diverse international multicultural perspectives within the profession.

Opportunities and Risks

While an expansion of international psychology offers many new opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration, it also presents several risks. Chief among these is the need to guard against the wholesale exportation of professional ideologies as they relate to practice, education, and research. As training programs, research methodologies, and journal publications based in the United States still account for the greatest proportion of counseling activities worldwide, several significant concerns are worth noting. Many methodologies, theories, and practices derived from current systems may, at best, ignore important and significant cross-cultural differences when transplanted to new cultures, and at worst, they may extend ethnocentric biases regarding human behavior to local psychologies. Examples of this include an over-reliance on diagnostic systems based on traditional medical models and the exportation of commonly used psychological tests to evaluate behavior. The generalization of Western diagnostic systems to other cultures may be inappropriate in many instances and may not reflect cultural norms for both functional and symptomatic behaviors. The use of psychological tests with individuals for whom their use has not been validated through the construction of appropriate norm groups, or that have been translated without evaluating their appropriate equivalency, may lead to misdiagnosis or an assignment of problems where none exist. A wholesale exportation of current models and methodologies also limits opportunities to expand our knowledge base in valuable ways that have the potential to validate (or invalidate) important concepts and practices through cross-cultural collaboration. Opening the field to alternative methodologies may increase understanding of how biases inherent in traditional systems operate when applied both to one's own and to other cultures.

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