The Experience of Counseling Interns and Their Perceived Preparedness of Multicultural Counseling: A Phenomenological Study

The purpose of this study was to acquire additional knowledge into the lived experiences of counseling interns and their perception of readiness for multicultural counseling. A phenomenological approached was used to understand the lived experiences and describe the essence of the phenomenon. Master’s level counseling interns (N=8) in CACREP accredited programs were surveyed in which they responded to five open-end question related to their experience. From those responses two themes emerged, participants described their perceived preparedness related to their mindfulness and education with diverse populations. The textural and structural descriptions of responses were combined (Creswell & Poth, 2018) to arrive at the essence of the participants’ experiences: Perceived preparedness of multicultural counseling was characterized by heightened awareness. The overarching finding from this study showed that all counseling interns perceived themselves prepared for multicultural counseling. These findings contradict previous findings by Malott et al (2014) study regarding a perceived lack of cultural knowledge of white counselor which was believed to thus affect their abilities to provided services across cultures (Malott et al, 2014). It is recommended to explore further research on an individual’s open mindedness or in other words mindfulness and its contribution to multicultural counseling competence