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experience. I’m wondering how likely you think it is that such concerns might arise
in our work together?’’ (cf. Sue & Sue, 2008).
Overall Cultural Assessment for Career Counseling and Intervention
The fifth dimension of the cultural formulations approach is Overall cultural assessment
for career counseling and intervention. The overall cultural assessment
involves integrating all of the cultural information into an integrated formulation,
which draws from career assessment information and seeks to provide a culturally
appropriate career counseling plan for the client. In this regard, Leong’s integrative
model (1996b) of psychotherapy can provide some guidance in conducting this overall
cultural assessment. In this model, Leong (1996b) began with a critique that the
unidimensional nature of the major career development theories tend to constrain
and confine the utility and relevance of career counseling services for minority
group members, including Asian Americans, because they are based on an assumed
universality.
Leong’s (1996b) multidimensional and integrative model of cross-cultural counseling
and psychotherapy used the tripartite framework of Kluckhohn and Murray
(1950) and proposed that cross-cultural counselors and therapists need to attend to
all three major dimensions of human personality and identity, namely the Universal,
the Group, and the Individual dimensions. The Universal dimension is based on the
knowledge-base generated by mainstream psychology and the ‘‘universal laws’’ of
human behavior that have been identified (e.g., the universal ‘‘fight or flight’’
response in humans to physical threat). The Group dimension has been the domain
of both cross-cultural psychology and ethnic minority psychology and the study of
gender differences. The third and final dimension concerns unique Individual
differences and characteristics. The Individual dimension is more often covered
by behavioral and existential theories, where individual learning histories and personal
phenomenology are proposed as critical elements in the understanding of
human behavior. Leong’s (1996b) integrative model proposes that all three dimensions
are equally important in understanding human experiences and should be
attended to by the counselor in an integrative fashion.
The integrative model of cross-cultural counseling proposed by Leong (1996b)
has as one of its fundamental bases the notion that the individual client must exist
at three levels, the Universal, the Group, and the Individual. The problem with much
of the past research in the field of cross-cultural counseling is that the focus has been
on only one of the three levels, ignoring the influence of the other levels in the counseling
situation. Leong’s (1996b) integrative model includes all three dimensions of
personality as well as their dynamic interactions, and thus will have better incremental
validity than any model that only focuses on only one of the three levels. Incremental
validity consists of greater variance of the criterion being predicted above
and beyond the original set of variables. For example, factoring in a person’s race
in addition to gender will increase our understanding of that person’s behavior with
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