Measures of Cultural Competence: Examining Hidden Assumptions

Brenda L. Beagan · Charlotte Loppie · Anna MacLeod · Blye W. Frank

327 citations0/0 files storedAcademic Medicine

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Cultural Competency in Health Care Innovations in Medical Education Racial and Ethnic Identity Research

Abstract

PURPOSE: The authors critically examined the quantitative measures of cultural competence most commonly used in medicine and in the health professions, to identify underlying assumptions about what constitutes competent practice across social and cultural diversity. METHOD: A systematic review of approximately 20 years of literature listed in PubMed, the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Social Services Abstracts, and the Educational Resources Information Center identified the most frequently used cultural competence measures, which were then thematically analyzed following a structured analytic guide. RESULTS: Fifty-four instruments were identified; the 10 most widely used were analyzed closely, identifying six prominent assumptions embedded in the measures. In general, these instruments equate culture with ethnicity and race and conceptualize culture as an attribute possessed by the ethnic or racialized Other. Cultural incompetence is presumed to arise from a lack of exposure to and knowledge of the Other, and also from individual biases, prejudices, and acts of discrimination. Many instruments assume that practitioners are white and Western and that greater confidence and comfort among practitioners signify increased cultural competence. CONCLUSIONS: Existing measures embed highly problematic assumptions about what constitutes cultural competence. They ignore the power relations of social inequality and assume that individual knowledge and self-confidence are sufficient for change. Developing measures that assess cultural humility and/or assess actual practice are needed if educators in the health professions and health professionals are to move forward in efforts to understand, teach, practice, and evaluate cultural competence.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 327 citations exist upstream.

References

1998Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education 1995Handbook of multicultural counseling 2005Cultural Competence 1994Development of the Multicultural Counseling Inventory: A self-report measure of multicultural competencies.2003Cross-cultural Medical Education 1991Evaluating the Impact of Multicultural Counseling Training 1999A Model and Instrument for Addressing Cultural Competence in Health Care 1991Development and factor structure of the Cross-Cultural Counseling Inventory--Revised.

Cited by

2009Cultural competence: a conceptual framework for teaching and learning 2014Cultural Competence Models and Cultural Competence Assessment Instruments in Nursing 2010A Three-Dimensional Model of Cultural Congruence: Framework for Intervention 2014Making Assumptions, Making Space: An Anthropological Critique of Cultural Competency and Its Relevance to Queer Patients 2016Inhospitable Healthcare Spaces: Why Diversity Training on LGBTQIA Issues Is Not Enough

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.