Ivey, Allen E. (1933-): Counseling Theory and Skills Training

Skills Training

In the 1970s, Ivey published two groundbreaking books describing microcounseling, a structured [Page 1186]approach to training counselors in discrete helping skills (microskills) such as attending behavior, open invitation to talk, reflection and summarization, paraphrasing, and interpretation. Although the first edition of this book did not focus on culture, the second edition described the cultural-environmental-contextual implications of microtraining. Rather than focusing solely on internal variables, like self-actualization, counselors can help clients focus on external variables that may impact development. This early recognition of the need to explore the cultural environment led to the realization that appropriate attending and helping skills differ from one cultural context to another.

Part of Ivey's motivation for combining his interests in skills training and cultural diversity was inspired by feedback from cross-cultural counselors who observed that the same skills did not have the same impact on clients from different cultural backgrounds. Based on this feedback, Ivey realized that some attending behaviors, like direct eye contact, were helpful in one cultural context but may damage rapport with clients from another background. This led to the development of the concept of culture-centered skills. In 1993, Paul Pedersen and Ivey directly applied the microskills training method to the topic of culture-centered counseling and concluded that developing culture-centered skills involves increasing the counselor's ability to interact with different cultures. These authors stressed the now familiar idea that the effective use of skills should be based on both awareness and knowledge. The key to the development of culture-centered skills is to examine a specific culture, identify concrete skills that may be useful with this particular group, and develop a helping theory that can be tested in practice.

In the same way that microskills training has been applied to culture-centered counseling, Ivey has infused the idea of culture into skills training. The development of cultural skills has been an increasingly consistent theme in each subsequent edition of the classic text Intentional Interviewing and Counseling. In the most recent (2007) edition, Ivey and coauthor Mary Bradford Ivey suggest that the purpose of counseling is to facilitate client development in a multicultural society. Ivey and Ivey summarize the fundamental relationship between skills and culture by concluding that the same skills may have different effects on people from varying cultural backgrounds. Therefore, effective cross-cultural counseling requires awareness that racial and ethnic groups may have different patterns of communication.

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