Cultural Bias in Psychological Tests

While much of the focus in the media has been on cultural bias in standardized testing for cognitive skills, or for college entrance examinations, there has been little discussion of the potential problems of cultural bias in psychological testing. Yet this is a significant problem for minority populations who might be inappropriately assessed because of psychological tests not designed to be sensitive to minority populations.

According to Rogler et al. (1991), the problem is multilevel. They note that there are inappropriate research methodologies, inadequate testing and treatment protocols, and overgeneralization of results. Thus, tests which have been designed for EuropeanAmerican populations are often applied to many different subpopulations of Hispanics, without regard for the specific cultural context of those groups.

The intention in the following pages is to explore the problems involved with cultural bias in psychological testing and to identify some potential alternatives to those biased tests.

It was not until the late 1960s that the concept of culturally sensitive mental health services was developed. At that time, the convergence of two factors led to a focus on the problems of traditional therapeutic modalities and services. The civil rights movement emphasized the distinctiveness of minority groups, while the community mental health movement spread to regions of the city which had n

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ative and healthy mainstream Americans. As a consequence, considerable effort has been devoted to developing methods to work with ethnic minorities or the culturally different in order to avoid doing harm to clients by using inappropriate tests or methods in inappropriate ways. Sue (1981) focused on counseling the culturally different, noting that methods should be appropriate to the individual's culture, while also recognizing the mainstream culture to which the individual belongs. More recently Velasquez et al. (1993) have emphasized working with the DSMIIIR with ethnic minority clients in a more appropriate way. As noted earlier, characteristics and qualities that are seen as healthy and normative for white males and females, may not be appropriate at all for ethnic minority clients navigating in their own subcultures. The acculturative process needs to be taken into account for these clients, along with its particular stresses. In addition, client behaviors need to be understood contextually, rather than outofcontext and in comparison to another culture's values and norms. According to Velasquez et al. (1993), the result of the cultural bias implicit in the DSM and in psychological testing instruments is that certain i
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Approximate Word count = 2090
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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