The Cultural Genogram: Key to Training Culturally Competent Family Therapists

Abstract

Training programs committed to the development of culturally competent family therapists must discover ways to raise cultural awareness and increase cultural sensitivity. While awareness involves gaining knowledge of various cultural groups, sensitivity involves having experiences that challenge individuals to explore their personal cultural issues. This article outlines how the cultural genogram can be used as an effective training tool to promote both cultural awareness and sensitivity.

Cultural sensitivity training: Description and evaluation of a workshop

“…This is not unlike a family tree but the major difference is that enables participants to trace intergenerational patterns of inter-marriage and migration across boundaries of sexual orientation, religion, race and ethnicity. (Details of how to do this are given in Hardy and Laszloffy 1995). Students were given coloured felt pens which were used to identify different cultures, languages and religions.…”

Save Room for Pie: Adding Pie Charts to Network Visualizations in R with statnet and plotrix

“…Here, the method can convey information on the presence of multiple health conditions for each member of the network, as well as the connections between family members (e.g., to show how clustering of heritable diseases may influence family health communication (Marcum and Koehly 2015;Ersig, Hadley, and Koehly 2011)). Existing approaches, such as genograms (Hardy and Laszloffy 1995;McGoldrick, Gerson, and Shellenberger 1999) and colored eco-genetic relationship maps (Peters, Kenen, Giusti, Loud, Weissman, and Greene 2004), use consanguine and affine pedigrees (or family trees) to impose relationships (i.e., normally the edges in a network) onto the pedigree vertices. Ludden, Goergen, and Koehly et al (2012) proposed to use quadrant sectors of a pie chart to visualize four health conditions among family members in a pedigree side-by-side with network data in an Family Health History application.…”

Social Justice Mentoring: Preparing Family Therapsists for Social Justice Advocacy Work

“…A final example of an assignment used in our graduate training program to assist students in exploring their positionality and societal privileges involves an adaptation of the "self of therapist genogram activity" (Halevy, 1998;Hardy, & Laszloffy, 1995). For this assignment, students are asked to construct a three generation genogram, which includes their grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, themselves, and their romantic partners.…”