This paper addresses cultural issues in occupational therapy practice through a review of the occupational therapy and culture literature and a brief exploration of key issues highlighted in analyses of discussions and critical incidents in transcripts of interviews with 86 occupational therapists. The data, collected in conjunction with the Intercultural Interaction Project, highlights seven important categories of issues from the perspective of therapists: (i) professional values; (ii) family roles and responsibilities; (iii) communication; (iv) social behaviours; (v) gender; (vi) 'sick' role; and (vii) explanatory models. The importance of the therapist's personal and professional values stands out even more strongly in our data than in the occupational therapy literature. This suggests that increased awareness of personal and professional values is one of the most critical issues for the development of culturally competent practitioners and satisfying, successful intercultural interactions. Our work suggests that the development of cultural competency based on issues associated with actual events is 'best practice' for addressing the needs of all clients and practitioners.K E Y W 0 R D S cultural competency, culture, culture education, ethnicity, intercultural interactions, occupational therapy practice.

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With the aging of many populations, health care workers and families increasingly find themselves jointly involved in situations involving decisions about nursing home placements. How each approaches such situations is affected by beliefs and assumptions about the role of family members in the care of family members and the decision making process. This paper explores the responses of people from four cultural groups living in Australia (Anglo-Celtic Australian, Chinese, Greek, Lebanese) to a critical incident scenario about a Russian family in Australia faced with such a decision. The responses to this scenario were remarkably similar across the four cultural groups. All saw making such a decision as difficult, but the reasons for the difficulty suggest some interesting cross-cultural distinctions. Some groups viewed care of a family member more in terms of a social and role obligation while others addressed it as a personal responsibility. To not care for elderly parents in the home was accompanied by a sense of guilt among some respondents and a sense of public social shame among others. Ambivalence about nursing homes and placing a family member in a nursing home, culture change and cross-generational differences, and roles and role support were other important themes. The results are consistent with other data analysed in conjunction with the Intercultural Interaction Project. The findings from this research suggests a need to examine more closely the beliefs and assumptions associated with nursing home placements and one way to help students and health professionals to do so.

The research undertaken by the primary author into the phenomenon of reflection in occupational therapy focused on the relation of personal and professional life spaces. A combination of lexicography-based analysis and metaphor analysis was used to explicate the autobiographical knowing within her published writings.The main method reported in this paper is a lexicography-based analysis derived from the style of dictionary making based on historical principles, as epitomised by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). A broader rather than a narrower meaning was found to be ascribed to the key word `occupation' in the literature of occupational therapy and, more recently, in that of occupational science. However, the present OED entry for `occupation' does not adequately track these changes in meaning.The combination of language-based methods used offers a new strategy for exploring implicit knowledge in the human-related professions. By integrating personal and professional life through the concept of occupation, the research has produced a deeper understanding of reflective practice. It contributes to the literature that suggests that congruent use of the term `occupation' (and related terms) may interpret a person's life experiences in a more coherent way than the use of language with clinical connotations. Future research into language for practice is proposed.