TPC-Journal-V5-Issue3

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 3 422 responsiveness, postulating that the Mexican-American client participants may have interpreted the Caucasian bilingual counselors’ willingness to learn and speak Spanish as a sign of respect for and responsiveness to their culture. Ramos-Sánchez et al. (1999) also found a non-significant effect of language and ethnicity on MCC and credibility. The non-significant findings of each of these studies may have been the result of sample limitations (e.g., small sample size, non-representative sample), confounding variables (e.g., counselor skill level) and study design limitations (e.g., client ratings based on a single session). Additional studies are needed to further understand the influence of bilingualism on counselors’ multicultural counseling competency development (Ramos-Sánchez, 2009). This study examined the effect of bilingualism on counseling students’ self-perceived MCC and generated the following research question: Do bilingual counseling students significantly self-rate their multicultural counseling knowledge and awareness higher than monolingual counseling students when controlling for ethnicity and multicultural training? Method This study was part of a larger project in which the authors examined factors associated with MCC. For the larger project, participants were 199 master’s-level counseling students enrolled in a CACREP-accredited counseling program at a university in the southwest region of the United States. The current study included 178 of the 199 master’s-level counseling students. Nineteen participants were excluded from the data analyses for a low census in the ethnic group with which they identified. This included participants who self-identified as Asian or Pacific Islanders (3% of sample), bicultural or multicultural (3%), other (2%), and those who did not select an ethnic group (1.5%). Two participants also were excluded from the analyses for not indicating their bilingual status. Participants The ages of the 178 participants were distributed as follows: the most frequent reported age range was 18–25 years ( n = 76; 42.7%), followed by 26–35 years ( n = 62; 34.8%), 36–45 years ( n = 23; 12.9%) and 45 years and older ( n = 17; 9.6%). Of the 178 participants, 142 identified as female (79.8%), 33 as male (18.5%), and one as transgendered (0.6%); two participants did not identify their gender (1.1%). The ethnic identity of the participants consisted of 83 Latinas/os (46.6%), 77 Caucasians (43.3%) and 18 African Americans (10.1%). Concerning bilingualism, 71 participants reported they were bilingual (39.9%). The majority of bilingual individuals identified as Latina/o ( n = 57; 80.3%), followed by Caucasian ( n = 9; 12.7%) and African American ( n = 5; 7%). Of those who reported they were bilingual, the majority ( n = 60; 84.5%) indicated that they spoke English and Spanish. Including English, other languages and language combinations that participants reported speaking included French ( n = 3; 4.2%); German ( n = 2; 2.8%); German, Spanish and Russian ( n = 1; 1.4%); Spanish and Portuguese ( n = 1; 1.4%); and Polish and Spanish ( n = 1; 1.4%). Of the 71 participants who reported being bilingual, three did not indicate the languages they spoke. Concerning multicultural training, 48 (27%) participants reported they had completed a multicultural counseling course at the time of the study, 35 (19.7%) indicated they currently were enrolled in a multicultural counseling course, and 95 (53.4%) indicated they had not yet taken a multicultural counseling course.