Juan Valladares; Hanna Prieto; Niyeli Herrera; Yerenia Flores, Brigham Young University
The purpose of this meta-analysis is to assess the degree to which multicultural competency impacts the effectiveness of psychological interventions of culturally diverse clients. As a construct, multicultural competence refers to the professional skill sets that promotes efficacious interventions of clientele with diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. Research has clearly demonstrated that disparities exists in terms of access, utilization, and overall outcomes when therapies are applied to culturally diverse patients. It is the goal of this meta-analysis to provide an empirical basis for clinical practice, future research, and methods that effectively meet the needs of these minority populations. We identified 27 studies containing data on 3,314 clients’ experiences in mental health treatments as a function of their therapists’ level of multicultural competence. The studies were evenly divided between published articles (52%) and unpublished dissertations (48%), with the bulk of the research being conducted after the year 2000 (93%). Three aspects of client treatment were considered: (a) client perceptions of therapists and treatments; (b) client participation in treatment; and (c) client outcomes (i.e., symptom reduction). We analyzed outcomes across these three aspects of client treatment separately and as an aggregate statistic. The result of the random effects weighted correlation with therapist multicultural competence was r = .57, with differences among these three types of outcomes reaching statistical significance (Q = 13.3, p = .001). An important factor that moderated the association was the measure used to assess multicultural competency, considering its respective psychometric properties. The distribution of effect sizes did not indicate that a publication bias affected the analysis of the data. When competencies are measured by the client, the results indicate that client participation and client outcomes significantly improve as a function of therapists’ multicultural competency. Although the overall variance is relatively moderate, it is comparable to other known predictors of change in therapeutic settings.