Culture, Race, and Sexual Socialization · Clinical Exercise

Ask, Do Not Infer

Two women, same age, same nominal heritage, same presenting concern, and almost nothing in common developmentally. The referral tells you neither of them apart.

What this exercise practises

The distinction the chapter calls a clinical precision requirement rather than a value: asking about cultural and racialized developmental context instead of inferring it from group membership, while still asking rather than avoiding.

Two of the wrong answers here are overcorrections. Declining to raise culture produces a formulation with a central dimension missing, and the exercise treats that as an error of its own.

Estimated time to complete this exercise: 25 minutes

1Two referrals
2Asks or assumes
3The intersection
4Strengths
5Your questions
6Close

Before you begin

How this one works

Five short parts, all multiple choice or sorting, with feedback on every answer. The writing box at the end is optional.
Two of the wrong answers in this exercise are overcorrections rather than prejudices. Declining to ask about culture produces a formulation with a hole in it, and the exercise treats that as an error in its own right.
The clients here are composites. No part of this exercise asks you to learn facts about cultural groups, because inferring from group membership is the specific error it is built to interrupt.
Nothing is graded and nothing you type leaves your browser. Reloading discards it.

The chapter calls cultural humility a clinical precision requirement rather than a value. This exercise is about what that distinction means in a first session.

References

  1. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
  2. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
  3. Kirmayer, L. J., Dandeneau, S., Marshall, E., Phillips, M. K., & Williamson, K. J. (2011). Rethinking resilience from indigenous perspectives. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 56(2), 84–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/070674371105600203