Examining the Relationships between Stages of Racial Identity, Cognitive Development, and Multicultural Counseling Training / Robbie J. Steward and Others.

This study examined the extent to which counseling students' sex, self-reported multicultural competence, and cognitive development stage scores account for the variance in White Racial Identity Stage scale scores. Participants, who were 92 white graduate students in counseling, took the White Racial Identity Attitude Scale, a 50-item self-report that assesses 5 racial identity stages proposed by J. E. Helms (1984). In general, regression analyses revealed that at least one, and in some cases, all four stages of cognitive development scores accounted for the variance in all five of the stages of white racial identity. Sex significantly accounted for the variance in four of the five stages of white racial identity, and self-reported multicultural competence accounted for the variance in three. It appeared that white racial identity attitudes were influenced not only by multicultural training and sex but by the complexity of cognitive schema that students bring to training. Implications for training are discussed. (Contains 6 tables and 47 references.) (SLD)

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