Cultural Considerations in the Assessment of Survivors of Torture

The cultural and ethnic landscape of North America is becoming increasingly diverse, with many refugees fleeing torture and persecution and seeking safety in the United States and Canada. In working with this population, clinicians must implement culturally appropriate methods of assessing and treat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of immigrant and minority health Vol. 21; no. 3; pp. 586 - 595
Main Author Raghavan, Sumithra S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer Science + Business Media 01.06.2019
Springer US
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Best practice
Comparative Law
Cross-Cultural Comparison
Cultural Characteristics
Cultural Competency - psychology
Ethnic Groups - psychology
Evaluation
Health risk assessment
Humans
International & Foreign Law
Language
Literature reviews
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Oppression
Private International Law
Psychological aspects
Psychological assessment
Psychological distress
Public Health
Refugees
Reproducibility of Results
REVIEW PAPER
Sociology
Stress, Psychological - ethnology
Surveys and Questionnaires - standards
Survivor
Survivors - psychology
Torture
Torture - psychology
Translating
United States
United States
North America
Torture
Cross-cultural assessment
Refugees
Measurement invariance
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Summary:The cultural and ethnic landscape of North America is becoming increasingly diverse, with many refugees fleeing torture and persecution and seeking safety in the United States and Canada. In working with this population, clinicians must implement culturally appropriate methods of assessing and treating individuals from diverse backgrounds. Culture can exert a powerful and often misunderstood influence on psychological assessment, and the critical challenge is to account for both subjective experience of the client and the objective symptoms or behaviors present. The present review explores the literature on cross-cultural issues in the assessment of survivors of torture. I summarize best practices and review the theoretical and statistical bases for establishing the equivalence of constructs across cultures. Discussion centers around the utility of a cross-culturally valid measure of distress, and it is hoped that this review will encourage collaboration between clinicians and psychometricians to develop assessments for use with this vulnerable population.
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ISSN:1557-1912
1557-1920
DOI:10.1007/s10903-018-0787-5