Client Who Is an Asian-American

¶ … client who is an Asian-American female and a social worker who is a Mexican-American female. The issue is how their respective cultural values may conflict an how this might affect the counseling situation. Both fill out the same questionnaire on basic values, with the score then plotted in grid form for comparison.

The comparison is made on the basis of some twelve basic values, values that differ from culture to culture and that manifest in different attitudes and behaviors. In this case, they manifest specifically in the way each individual relates to ad understands the other, which is why they may affect the counseling situation.

Once the scores are tabulated and an average is found, the results can be plotted on the grid for each person to find where the two average scores intersect, representing the individual's basic tendency, and the grids can then be compared. These grids represent a personal profile for each person, representing an approximation of the person's actions within his or her own culture. The grid shows how contrasting traits interact and pull in different directions to result in the final direction taken. The twelve dimensions examined in this test are time orientation, even orientation, dischotomistic thinking, holistic thinking, crisis orientation, noncrisis orientation, task orientation, person orientation, status focus, achievement focus, concealment of vulnerability, and willingness to expose vulnerability. The last two of these can be particularly cogent in the counseling situation for the client, determining how involved the client will be in the process of counseling and in making the personal revelations necessary for the counseling situation to be fruitful.

The scores for the two people filling out the questionnaire develop as follows:

Dimension

Mexican-American

Asian-American

Time orientation

3.8

5.4

Event orientation

3.6

2.6

Dichotomistic thinking

2.2

3.8

Holistic thinking

4.6

2.2

Crisis orientation

3.0

5.6

Noncrisis orientation

2.6

2.2

Task orientation

4.4

5.0

Person orientation

5.0

2.4

Status focus

2.8

3.4

Achievement focus

5.8

3.4

Concealment of vulnerability 3.8

3.2

Willingness to expose vulnerability

2.2

1.8

Time orientation is seen as whether the individual has an orientation to past or future, though any analysis of this dimensions, as with o6thers, must be considered more in a comparative than an absolute sense. Thoms (2004) note that it has been suggested that North American and Western European culture see high Future Time Perspective as positive, correlating it with high achievement. Some analysts find that Native American men area more oriented toward the past, but others find that these men have as much a high future Time Perspective as others. Thoms notes that "cultures such as Native American ones that honor their ancestors or have a cyclical conception of time may infer to outsiders that the culture is past oriented" (34). Thoms says that ideas about time orientation are based on cultural stereotypes more than on reality.

Based on the current examination, the time orientation of the Asian-American woman is high at 5.4, compared to my own at 3.8. The idea of an Asian orientation to the past is in keeping with these results. Also, the client's orientation is more toward the time taken for a process, while my own is more evenly divided and more attuned to taking the time necessary to achieve the goals. This could mean that the client would be more impatient to achieve results and less willing to take the time needed to develop the parameters of the issue.

The client and I have a very different balance between dichotomistic thinking and holistic thinking as well. The client is more given to dichotomistic thinking, which is counter-intuitive to the way Asians are normally viewed. Asians are thought of as more holistic, but the scores on this dimensions show this woman to be otherwise, with a more divisive view of the world: "A dichotomy . . . is a splitting that is logically complete as everything left must become either one kind of thing or the other. And it is a separation that is asymmetric. The two limit state outcomes are logically as different as they can be" (McCrone, 2007, para. 10).