The Development and Evaluation of a Cultural Competency Training Programme for Psychologists Working with Māori: A Training Needs Analysis

The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a cultural competency training programme for clinical psychology students to work with Māori consumers. A pilot programme (study 1) was developed from the international and national cultural competency and bicultural training literature. Following the pilot, it was identified that the programme could be made more robust by conducting a second study the training needs analysis using the critical incident technique. Study two was conducted with 30 experienced clinical psychologists who had worked with Māori clients. The training needs analysis sought to identify the awareness, knowledge and skills (AKS) that the experienced psychologists used in their practice with Māori. An unexpected finding from study two was that the psychologists used distinctly Māori-cultural practices incorporating Māori tikanga and Māori knowledge with their clients even though they had little or no bicultural course content in their clinical training. The data from the pilot programme, and the training needs analysis were used to refine the final workshop. The workshop was delivered to two university sites over a two-day period using intern clinical psychologist. The programme evaluation had three components: (1) analysis of pre and post programme questionnaires; (2) analysis of the retrospective questionnaires (3) and an analysis of a participant’s case report on a Māori consumer. The themes that evolved from this research are that the critical incident technique is a useful way of identifying bicultural training material that would otherwise go unnoticed. In relation to training evaluation, there is a real need to develop meaningful measures of bicultural competency acquisition for clinical students. The finding advances the proposition that a distinct Māori psychology exists that could potentially challenge the relevance of Western psychology for Māori. A contextual theme underpinning bicultural training programmes is that training and practice occurs against the backdrop of Pākehā dominance in all aspects of academia and society. Consequently, there is a need to find a balance between Māori and Western psychological knowledge. Future uses of this research will be in developing and evaluating bicultural training programmes, developing appropriate measures of cultural competency acquisition and assessing the potential for a distinct Māori psychology