IDENTIFIERS *Multicultural Counseling

Multicultural counseling competence is of paramount importance. For counselors to be able to better meet the needs of their clients, and for counselor education programs to better prepare their students to meet the needs of a diverse population, it is necessary to uncover and learn to effectively manipulate all the pieces of the puzzle of multicultural counseling competence. This study examined the relation of master's level counselors ' (N.36) multicultural counseling competence, conscientiousness, and openness to experience on the Multicultural Counseling Inventory, the NEO-FFI, and the Counselor Evaluation Rating Scale. Correlational analysis was used. Multicultural counseling competence and general counseling competence were found to be significantly correlated. However, only a moderate portion of the variance in multicultural counseling competence can be associated with the variance in general counseling competence. The overlap of these variables appears to be modest enough t