Education Commons^™

Baseline Cultural Competence In Physician Assistant Students, Melanie M. Domenech-Rodriguez, Paula B. Phelps, H. Cathleen Tarp

Psychology Faculty Publications

Purpose

Cultural competence is a critical component in health care services. The relationship between health disparities and prejudice and discrimination is well documented. Prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory behavior are modifiable through training yet few programs have evidence-based training. No published data has reported on baseline levels of cultural competencies in medical trainees which is necessary for tailoring programs appropriate to the audience. This manuscript fills that gap by reporting on data from three cohorts of first-year Physician Assistant (PA) students (N = 216). We examined students’ baseline levels with special attention to differences in cultural competence constructs across age, …

Commentary: Are Groups More Or Less Than The Sum Of Their Members? The Moderating Role Of Individual Identification, Zhonglu Zhang, Christopher M. Warren, Yi Lei, Qiang Xing, Hong Li

Psychology Faculty Publications

Baumeister et al. (2016) proposed that people perform better in groups only “when members of the group are individually identified and responsible” (p. 2), and conversely, that people perform worse in groups when they “are not publicly identified or rewarded” (p. 2). In other words, they emphasized how individual responsibility contributes to group success. However, we argue that shared identity, whereby group members share a common responsibility, can also facilitate group success in many circumstances, and thus should not be discounted. Several authors have shared the same view in the open peer commentary published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences about …

Culture, Timothy B. Smith, Melanie M. Domenech-Rodriguez, Guillermo Bernal

Psychology Faculty Publications

This article summarizes the definitions, means, and research of adapting psychotherapy to clients' cultural backgrounds. We begin by reviewing the prevailing definitions of cultural adaptation and providing a clinical example. We present an original meta-analysis of 65 experimental and quasi-experimental studies involving 8,620 participants. The omnibus effect size of d = .46 indicates that treatments specifically adapted for clients of color were moderately more effective with that clientele than traditional treatments. The most effective treatments tended to be those with greater numbers of cultural adaptations. Mental health services targeted to a specific cultural group were several times more effective than …