School of Counseling and Human Services, Walden
University COUN 6100-34: Introduction to Clinical Mental
Health Counseling
14:51:27 GMT -05:00
, Journal: Multicultural Awareness
Multicultural awareness is defined as having the ability to understand other’s cultures,
practices, and values while being aware of the sensitivities associated with differences of cultural
beliefs and respecting another’s culture. Through the process, one can examine their awareness
of one’s values and beliefs. This journal will discuss my findings, look at my multicultural
awareness, explore my differences and developmental stage, and discuss the importance of
multiculturism and cultural competency.
Multicultural Self-Assessment
The multicultural self-assessment (Petrone, 2004) is a tool devised to bring awareness to
a student’s attitude and interaction with others. While taking the self-assessment test, I learned
that I always try to be mindful of the feelings of others. I believe that everyone is unique, and
while we may belong to different backgrounds and cultures, we are all human beings, and I have
always tried to live my life respecting others and including everyone. While answering the self-
assessment, each statement rang true to me; most of the statements were marked as “almost
always.”
The Harvard Implicit Bias self-assessments that I participated in are the “gender-career
task” and the “age task”. The gender-career task results suggested that I have a strong
automatic association when it comes to male with career and female with family and the age
task suggested that I prefer younger people to older people. However, I don’t believe that it
was a fair
measurement as to my beliefs, because the tests were only measured by responding to words on
the screen and I believe that an in-depth questionnaire would provide more accurate results.
I believe that my attitude and interactions are due to living in another country for over
five years. Living in Japan, I also had the opportunity to travel throughout all of Asia and parts
of