Metacognition and multicultural competence: expanding the culturally appropriate career counseling model.

The authors focus on the significance of the counselor's cultural contexts in effective career interventions vis-a-vis the incorporation of multicultural metacognition. They briefly summarize and critique extant career counseling models for racial/ethnic minority clients and then describe an expanded model for career counseling that incorporates metacognition processes for addressing counselor-related cultural factors.

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Cultural diversity is a significant feature of the social context in which career development and work behavior occur (Sue, Parham, & Santiago, 1998). Increasing numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and older workers are entering the U.S. workforce. Within the field of vocational psychology, there is a growing recognition of the need for context-sensitive career counseling that acknowledges the impact of clients' cultural contexts on their career behavior (Blustein, 2001; Chung, 2003; Cook, Heppner, & O'Brien, 2002; Fouad, 2001; Hartung, 2002; Ponterotto, Rivera, & Sueyoshi, 2000; Pope, 2003; Whiston, 2003). Although there is growing consensus in vocational psychology for career counseling to be culture centered, relatively little is known empirically about how, exactly, culture influences vocational processes. The assumption is that the relevance of career interventions in general can be increased by approaches that take into account the sociocultural, historical, and political factors that shape career development for culturally diverse groups and significantly influence their view of themselves and their view of the world. We acknowledge that every individual belongs to many cultural groups, and thus all people are culturally diverse. Although our discussion is relevant to all career clients, we particularly focus on racial/ethnic minorities in this article.

We believe that career counseling that is context sensitive includes explicit, ongoing attention not only to the client's cultural contexts but also to the cultural contexts of the counselors. In this article, we examine the significance of cultural factors that have an impact on the multicultural efficacy of career counseling from the counselor's perspective. We first briefly discuss the importance of culturally competent career practice and the relevance of multicultural guidelines to facilitating such practice. Next, we summarize and critique career intervention models for racial and ethnic minorities regarding the models' attention to the impact of counselors' multicultural awareness throughout the course of intervention. Then, we offer an expanded application of one model, the Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling Model (CACCM; Fouad & Bingham, 1995), by incorporating metacognitive processes to guide counselors' culturally centered career interventions. We conclude with recommendations for practice that focus on enhancing career counselors' multicultural competence in the counseling process.

Career Counseling: What We Know and Do Not Know

Support has been found for the effectiveness of career counseling in helping clients make vocational choices and career decisions (Oliver & Spokane, 1988; Ryan, 1999; Spokane & Oliver, 1983; Whiston, Sexton, & Lasoff, 1998). Brown and Krane (2000) reported on results from Ryan's (1999) meta-analysis, noting that five critical components contributed to the effectiveness of career counseling: written exercises, individualized interpretations and feedback, world-of-work information, modeling opportunities, and social support. Brown and Krane noted, however, that little information is available on the role that race, gender, and sexual orientation play in career interventions. More specifically, Heppner and Heppner (2003) observed how much remains unknown about the impact of both clients' and counselors' cultural factors on counseling outcomes. In other words, although we know career counseling is effective, we do not know whether some types of career counseling are more effective for particular clients than are other types, nor do we know how cultural variables may influence the career decision-making process.

Our minimal knowledge base of how cultural processes shape career counseling reflects the assumptions, which undergird many approaches to career counseling, that cultural contexts are not significant in career behavior. The assumed equality of vocational opportunity and freedom of career choice for most people are among the assumptions that characterize traditional career theory, research, and practice. In addition, there is a tradition of focusing on individualism in career development (Gysbers, Heppner, Johnston, & Neville, 2003). These premises may hinder multicultural counseling effectiveness in that they disregard the macroenvironmental variables that constrain the optimal career development of many people in the United States (Fitzgerald & Betz, 1994). These macroenvironmental variables operate through, as Savickas (2001) noted, a social opportunity structure that "too often assigns developmental pathways based on gender, race, and ethnicity" (p. 302). The interaction between clients' cultural contexts and large environmental variables may result in differential career development experiences. It is critical that career counselors explicitly work to ensure that clients' concerns are understood within their cultural context to help understand how those differential experiences affect development and career choices (or lack of choices).

Recently, Fouad and Byars-Winston (2005) conducted a meta-analysis of 16 studies with more than 19,000 participants to examine racial and ethnic differences in variables related to career choice. Their findings indicated no differences in career aspirations by self-reported racial/ethnic group identification, but racial/ethnic minorities perceived fewer career opportunities and greater career barriers than did their White/European American counterparts. Fouad and Byars-Winston's findings suggest that the perceived external challenges of racial and ethnic minority clients differ from those perceived by majority culture clients. In addition, their perspectives may simply be different. Not acknowledging the perceived or actual constraints of clients' cultural contexts can lead to offering overly simplified solutions to clients' concerns or to offering the "premature solution," a common tendency in multicultural counseling (Ivey, as cited in Pedersen, 1990). Insight into clients' cultural contexts and cultural empathy for their lived experiences can improve counselors' multicultural competence.

The American Psychological Association's (APA; 2003) Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists provides a framework to help counselors gain awareness of themselves and of their clients as they strive to provide culture-centered practices. Guideline 1 encourages psychologists and counselors to realize that they may hold detrimental views of culturally different clients. Drawing from social categorization theory, this guideline is based on the finding that, fundamentally, individuals' perspectives about others are shaped by their own culture (or cultures; Fiske, 1998). Although this seems self-evident, psychologists have also found that individuals tend to group those perspectives and the information they receive about others into manageable categories, with attributes associated with those categories. This categorization process occurs outside conscious processing, often occurring automatically. All individuals tend to view members of their own "in group" as positive and members of their "out group" as negative. Consider, for example, attributes associated with one's favorite athletic team and then consider attributes associated with a rival team. What may seem a trivial example has critical implications for career counselors because they may not realize they have placed clients into a category that has negative attributes associated with it.

Thus, insight is a critical component in effective counseling to help counselors understand what their "in group" is, what categories they may be using with clients, and what attributes they associate with those categories. Insight is dependent on a high level of knowledge, awareness, and skill (Pedersen, 1990), which are also three fundamental components of multicultural competence. The counselor's ability to generate insights for the client is dependent on the counselor's understanding of the salient cultural contexts in the client's life. That understanding is filtered through the counselor's own cultural lens (Pedersen, 1990). Pedersen encouraged counselors to begin with an understanding of themselves and their cultural assumptions. Thus, career counselors' multicultural competence and insight are not solely a by-product of deliberate avoidance of cultural encapsulation but instead are a result of addressing their own culture-specific assumptions (Pedersen, 1990). We contend that career counselors' ability to generate insight is greatly shaped by their self-awareness and monitoring of their own cultural processes in the counseling situation. Thus, traditional career counseling must incorporate different variables and different processes to be effective in addressing clients' diverse cultural contexts.

Career Counseling and Assessment Models for Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Bingham and Ward (1994) asserted that career counseling must change in response to the changing demographics and current needs in the United States. Many publications (e.g., Cook et al., 2002; Flores, Spanierman, & Obasi, 2003; Hartung et al., 1998; Ponterotto et al., 2000), including several edited books dedicated to this topic (Leong, 1995; Walsh, Bingham, Brown, & Ward, 2001), have offered principles and culturally relevant strategies to inform career intervention practice and assessment with various racial/ethnic minority clients. Notably, several heuristic models for working with racial and ethnic minority career clients have emerged over the last decade.

In their original work, Ward and Bingham (1993) offered concepts for understanding and using clients' cultural contexts, worldviews, and identities in career interventions with racial and ethnic minority women. Later, they articulated a more formal intervention model, adding components of efficacy variables to general cultural variables (e.g., worldviews, structure of opportunity), gender variables (e.g., gender role socialization, salience of work/family domains), and traditional career assessment (Bingham & Ward, 1994, 1997). Fouad and Bingham (1995), building on the foundation laid by Bingham and Ward (1994), proposed the CACCM. This model includes seven steps that explicitly incorporate cultural variables into career interventions, thereby offering an iterative process for identifying clients' career concerns and the cultural contexts in which they occur. We discuss the CACCM more fully in the latter half of this article. Leong and Hartung (1997) articulated an integrative-sequential model to cross-cultural career counseling that includes the emergence of career and vocational problems, help-seeking and career services utilization, evaluation of career and vocational problems, career interventions, and career intervention outcomes. They emphasized the influence of clients' ecological systems in determining the emergence, recognition, and acceptance of vocational problems.

Common to this scholarship on career counseling and assessment with racial and ethnic minorities is the assertion that clients' career behavior does not develop in a vacuum but rather through interactions between the individual and his or her social systems (Cook et al., 2002; Leong & Hartung, 1997). Thus, consistent with assumptions found in the metatheory of multicultural counseling and therapy (Sue, Ivey, & Pedersen, 1996), career intervention models for working with racial and ethnic minorities support the premise that counseling is more effective if the career counselor incorporates the life experiences, worldview, and multiple identities of the client into problem conceptualization and intervention planning. These models also share the view that to be effective in understanding and evaluating their clients' career concerns, career counselors need to understand their own experiences by being aware of the many cultural contexts in which they themselves live and how these contexts have shaped their career-related opportunities, values, and beliefs (Bingham & Ward, 1994, 1997). Effective career counselors examine their personal worldviews and multicultural competence relative to their knowledge, awareness, and skills about their own culture and as well as that of others (Fouad & Bingham, 1995). Failure to do so is likely to perpetuate ethnocentric assumptions common to many career theories identified earlier in this article.

There are three interrelated shortcomings in these models. First, although the models make intuitive sense, they have not been empirically supported. A research synthesis of the role of culture in each separate step of the CACCM (Ihle Helledy et al., 2004) concluded that the evidence indicated "preliminary validation for the influence of cultural variables in the career counseling process" (p. 276), but research has not explicitly focused on whether the inclusion of cultural variables in career counseling is more effective than traditional career counseling. Second, although these models, to varying degrees, acknowledge the need for counselors to consider their own sociocultural experiences, attitudes, and worldviews, they focus primarily on the importance of the counselor gaining knowledge of clients' cultural contexts. This emphasis on the client implicitly maintains a view of culture as a source of variance to be identified largely within the client and then integrated into career counseling, with the outcome centered on increasing counselors' cultural sensitivity and receptivity to clients. As was mentioned earlier in this article, individuals' perspectives about others are shaped by their own culture (Fiske, 1998), and, as such, counselors' cultural characteristics significantly affect how and what they attend to with their clients. Finally, the models largely focus on counselors gaining cultural self-awareness in preparation for counseling and pay little attention to how counselors can extend and apply this self-awareness throughout the counseling relationship. Beyond counselor preparation, we also believe it is critical to explicitly address the counselor's cultural contexts and perspectives in the counseling process. Thus, we advocate for counselors' development of metacognitive awareness of their cultural context and how their thinking and perceptions may influence the way they view clients' cultural context throughout the course of intervention.

Metacognition "focuses on people's self-monitoring and self-control of their own cognitions" (Nelson, Narens, & Dunlosky, 2004, p. 53) and has been extensively used in educational psychology to help understand how people learn (e.g., Aleven, Stahl, Schworm, Fischer, & Wallace, 2003; Everson & Tobias, 1998; Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002; Reed, Schallert, & Deithloff, 2002). We use the term metacognition here to refer to counselors' active incorporation of their own cultural frameworks, values, and worldview into the counseling process as an interaction rather than considering that counselors' cultural context should only inform specific steps or strategies of career interventions. We argue, then, that counselors need to actively ask themselves questions such as, What are my own cultural values and how might those influence my thinking with this client? or How might my own experiences with a person of this background affect the way that I view his or her concerns? Our discussion now turns to an important aspect of the career counselor's multicultural competence: conscientious, deliberate self-reflection on his or her cultural contexts in the counseling process.

Counselor Metacognition: Toward Improving Multicultural Competence in Career Counseling

Much attention has been given to developing multicultural awareness as a critical component of cultural competence (APA, 2003). Multicultural awareness may include awareness of salient demographic and background characteristics of clients' lives as well as of the counselor's. Whereas such awareness facilitates a consciousness of information or alertness to cultural matters, we encourage the adoption of a more deliberate and careful cognitive attentiveness to and application of such awareness.

Stewart (2002) observed that an increasingly culturally diverse society necessitates that counselors use a wider range of information to interpret the behavior of others; however, as shown in research on social cognition, the manner in which counselors respond to and interact with clients is dependent on the counselors' experiences and the cognitions available to them at any given time (Leong & Hartung, 2000). This manner of understanding is defined as a mind-set consisting of three domains: availability of culturally specific knowledge, ability to process information using this knowledge, and the ability to monitor one's thoughts and thought processes (i.e., metacognition; Peterson, Sampson, Lenz, & Reardon, 1996; Stewart, 2002). Many models or frameworks for culturally relevant career interventions focus a great deal on the first and second domains of mind-set: identifying and understanding the client's specific sources of cultural identity as well as the contextual and environmental factors, which are also culture bound, that shape their career behavior (Arbona, 1995; Bingham & Ward, 1994, 1997; Bowman, 1995; Byars, 2001; Flores et al., 2003; Fouad & Bingham, 1995; Hartung et al., 1998; Ponterotto et al., 2000; Ward & Bingham, 1993). We contend, however, that it is the third domain of mindset that has not been addressed directly in career intervention models, that is, the counselor's self-monitoring of cognitions.

Metacognition, as the final domain of mind-set, underscores the need for counselors to engage in ongoing self-reflection regarding the cognitive schema and thinking strategies used to understand and interpret client information (Stewart, 2002). One underlying tenet in culturally competent counseling is the appropriate selection and application of intervention strategies and skills. Metacognitive awareness provides a nexus between knowledge of culturally specific client information and identification of culturally appropriate counseling techniques by actively addressing counselors' cultural contexts in the process. The three components of mind-set, combined, also underscore Stead's (2004) assertion that career counseling is itself a cultural process. That is, all career interventions are situated within a cultural context (Leong & Hartung, 1997) that is shaped by the client's and the counselor's cultural characteristics. The dynamic, interactional relationships that are formed between clients with their personal cultural contexts and identities and counselors with their personal cultural contexts and identities both before and during counseling and the direct, moment-to-moment interaction between clients and counselors define the complex course of counseling.

It is essential that counselors bring their knowledge of their personal cultural contexts to the forefront of their thinking during the counseling process. This becomes even more critical in light of Kruger and Dunning's (1999) study that showed that errors in metacognitive skills led to participants in the top performance group underestimating their abilities and those in the low performance group overrating their abilities. A similar result was found for medical residents appraising their patient-interviewing skills (Hodges, Regehr, & Martin, 2001). Kruger and Dunning concluded that "not only do [the incompetent] reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it" (p. 1134).

The relevance of this work to career counselors is that most professionals make the same errors as do lay people and are thus vulnerable to biases in their clinical judgments (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003; Ridley, 1995). Stewart (2002) termed this clinical bias the overconfidence effect that leads counselors to place great certainty in the accuracy of their clinical assessments. Acquiring knowledge about clients' cultural contexts and identities can indirectly promote a sense of cultural competence on the part of the counselor (e.g., "I understand my client's career concern from her or his cultural perspective"), leading to overestimation by the counselor of her or his counseling abilities (e.g., "I know the right intervention to resolve the concern"). Kruger and Dunning's (1999) research findings challenge career counselors to ask themselves how they know that they are being effective with their clients. The answer lies in developing metacognitive skills and critical awareness to recognize and evaluate competent performance. Metacognition facilitates one's ability to anticipate or recognize accuracy and error (Metcalfe & Shimamura, 1994). The following discussion provides an application of how counselors' metacognitive awareness can enhance their multicultural competence in delivering effective career interventions.

Expanding the CACCM

As we have previously summarized, the CACCM (Fouad & Bingham, 1995) is one approach that incorporates culture as a critical factor in every aspect of the counseling process. The CACCM includes the following seven steps: counselor's establishment of a culturally appropriate relationship with the client (Step 1), identification of career issues (Step 2), assessment of the impact of cultural factors on identified career issues (Step 3), and appropriate process and goal setting (Step 4). Steps 5 and 6, determination and implementation of culturally appropriate intervention and culturally appropriate decision making, respectively, concentrate on the counselor and client developing specific career counseling strategies to address the client's career concerns. Finally, Step 7 focuses on implementation of the client's plans and follow-up.

We believe that the counselor's cultural contexts bear on all aspects of the counseling process described in the CACCM. For instance, in the initial establishment of rapport toward building a culturally appropriate relationship, the counselor's cultural values are likely to shape what is listened to and observed regarding the client. As such, consideration of the counselor's cultural contexts in career counseling must extend beyond the preparation phase, which in the original CACCM was the primary focus of the counselor's context. In this section, we expand the CACCM to explicitly address the influence of counselors' cultural contexts by incorporating the concept of metacognitive awareness as a facilitative skill in the identification of career issues and resulting career counseling goals.

Leong and Hartung (1997) noted that culture plays a role in the perception, recognition, and evaluation of career problems and stated that it is the client's "culture's conception of what is normal and expected within one's work life" (p. 186) that significantly influences what issues and behavior are defined as a career or vocational problem. That is, the cultural differences in norms, values, and expectations significantly shape the emergence and recognition of career problems for racial and ethnic minorities. As did Leong and Hartung (1997), we assert that such cultural influences on the emergence and recognition of a career problem operate not only for the client but also for the counselor. That is, how career issues emerge and are recognized in career counseling is the result of a transaction between both the counselor's and the client's cultural contexts. If the client reports an issue that is not seen as such by the counselor, it is easy for the counselor to overlook that issue or make culturally insensitive responses. It is the intersection of clients' career problem identification with counselors' ability to accurately recognize and evaluate the career problem that determines the identification of career issues in the CACCM and selection of culturally appropriate goals and counseling.

The use of metacognitive strategies builds a bridge between all steps in the model. The metacognitive framework illustrates the fluidity between the steps in the CACCM and facilitates the counselor's formation of goal intentions (e.g., desired end states) and implementation intentions (e.g., goal-directed behaviors and plans to achieve one's goals) by directing the counselor's attention to situational and client cues that serve to guide culturally relevant responses (cf. Gollwitzer, 1999). Indeed, recycling can occur through the steps of the CACCM as a function of insights gained by the counselor (and client) through deliberate metacognitive reflection.

Metacognitive skill is developed via three processes: developing a plan of action, implementing the plan and self-monitoring, and evaluating the plan. Several strategies from Morrow and Deidan's (1992) and Ridley's (1995) writings on overcoming bias in counseling are relevant to facilitating metacognitive competence and are integrated in the discussion of strategies that follows. In Figure 1, we offer examples of questions that can facilitate career counselors' metacognitive awareness in the CACCM for the six primary steps of career counseling.

Plan

Developing a plan of action to work with the client includes many of the counselor self-reflections identified in writings on career counselor preparation that have been previously cited. Career practitioners should explore their prior knowledge relative to racial and ethnic minority clients, identifying gaps in their knowledge. In Step 1, for example, they may ask themselves, What are my strengths? What are my areas of challenge? This exploration will direct the counselor to consider what her or his initial goals and intentions are in working with this client. On what premises (e.g., theoretical, cultural, intrapersonal) are these goals and intentions based? In developing a plan of action, career counselors should actively reflect on how their initial goal intentions are informed by their cultural values. They should consider how the strategies they intend to use to understand the client's career issues are constrained or facilitated by these values and be open to other useful means to understand the career concerns of the client that are not usually selected to be addressed. Counselors are encouraged to select multimodal approaches to working with their clients.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Monitor

Career counselors must regularly monitor how and to what aspects of client information they are attending and what that reflects about their own cultural values and worldviews; the questions that help counselors to monitor these aspects are identified in Steps 2 to 4 in Figure 1. Are there some areas that the counselor is avoiding or emphasizing more than the client is? For instance, counselors may be attuned to addressing multiple role management and work-life issues with female clients and less so with male clients. How does the counselor respond when these issues are not salient for a female client or when they are salient for a male client?

Monitoring one's counseling practice through metacognitive awareness means that career counselors must accept their own cultural naivete (Stewart, 2002). Counselors must seek out, on a continual basis, all logical possibilities for understanding and explaining clients' career concerns. This suggests that counselors should give equal weight to client information that is gained later in the counseling relationship as they give to information that is gained at the onset and should maintain a perpetual curiosity about the client's experience. The counselor's ability to monitor his or her own thoughts and thought processes includes being open to information that may contradict initial clinical impressions. For instance, how does the counselor handle conflicting data from the client? Confirmatory bias, or the tendency to seek validation of initial impressions, has been identified as particularly deleterious to effective multicultural counseling. Ridley (1995) encouraged counselors to use both confirmatory as well as disconfirmatory strategies so that they deliberately seek to validate as well as invalidate their clinical judgments. Morrow and Deidan (1992) also recommended that counselors actively attend to seemingly less important details about the client and take a view of the client from a different theoretical orientation. Through active monitoring of their own learning, counselors may increase the self-regulatory cognitions that allow them to adjust their thoughts and behavior in response to feedback from clients.

Evaluate

Metacognitive skill requires that career counselors go beyond good intentions and multicultural awareness to evaluating the effectiveness of their interventions. For example, in Figure 1, Steps 5 and 6 include the need to evaluate interventions and decision-making processes. Ridley (1995) stated that many counselors assume that their good intentions make them helpful clinicians. This assumption can lead to the use of bad, although well-intending, interventions. To avoid the good intentions-bad interventions scenario, Ridley urged counselors to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions regarding their helpfulness, which entails taking a serious look at themselves and admitting where there is room for improvement. Simply asking oneself, How do I know that I have been effective? or What are the consequences of my behavior or intervention strategy? will focus career counselors on which criteria (e.g., verbal or nonverbal client cues) they use to evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of their counseling.

Career counselors need to develop standards of reference for evaluating culturally appropriate career outcomes because there is no empirical research on career intervention outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities (Leong & Hartung, 1997). Parallel to course assignments in counselor training programs that require trainees to record and transcribe their counseling sessions, counselors may select a particular segment of a counseling session to review and analyze across three dimensions: client themes, counselor's intentions behind each intervention, and evaluation of the impact of the intervention. The focus should be on counselors' metacognitive awareness in noting personal cultural influences and client cultural cues to which they responded and the outcomes used as evidence for one's clinical effectiveness. Counselors should especially attend to the cultural congruence between the client's and counselor's outcome goals. This exercise provides counselors with structure for evaluating what they do, why they do it, and whether or not it is effective. Kruger and Dunning (1999) found that performance evaluation and feedback increased the accuracy of participants' self-evaluation. Accordingly, structured practices such as the session transcription exercise just described may increase the probability of career counselors becoming more intentional and reflective about selecting culturally appropriate counseling interventions with a client. This strategy may be especially useful for career counselors who practice independently or who lack access to peer supervision. We believe that these strategies actively encourage career practitioners to assess the cultural goodness of fit with respect to their assessment of the client's career issues and consequential counseling processes.

Summary and Conclusion

In this article, we extended the concept of metacognition to the CACCM (Fouad & Bingham, 1995) as a means to facilitate culturally appropriate career counseling practice. By actively engaging in self-reflective processes, or metacognition, throughout the course of counseling, career counselors may increase their capacity to examine and address the impact of their personal cultural contexts on their work with clients.

We believe that metacognitive strategies have great potential to increase the multicultural competence of career counselors. By engaging in this ongoing self-reflective process, they will be more likely to make accurate assessments of their counseling effectiveness based on active self-awareness and multiple sources of data from the client and be challenged to actively build their repertoire of culturally appropriate intervention strategies with racial and ethnic minority clients. Because these strategies provide a mechanism for counselors to uncover their personal hidden assumptions throughout the counseling process, we also believe that these strategies are as useful for career counselors who are themselves members of racial/ethnic minority groups as they are for those who are not and that they are applicable to working with all career clients regardless of race or ethnicity.

In conclusion, general agreement exists that the principles of culturally competent counseling include self-knowledge, cultural knowledge, adopting an advocacy or change agent role for clients, awareness of culturally appropriate skills and techniques, and comfort with cultural differences (APA, 2003; Arredondo et al., 1996). Common to all of these principles, however, is the need to implement them with flexibility (Parker, 1988). Counselor flexibility and critical thinking are enhanced by metacognitive skills that include the ability to learn from mistakes and adjust behavior, as well as the facility to switch between strategies as needed (Van Der Zee & Oudenhoven, 2000). The unique intersection of multiple cultural identities and contexts in all individuals requires that career counselors be flexible in the provision of services to clients in a changing multicultural society. Indeed, Constantine (1998) asserted that cultural competence is both population and situation specific. Finally, we offer our suggestions for effective multicultural career counseling with a caveat: These suggestions are largely based on empirical studies and theoretical writings that have found distinct career development behavior of racial/ethnic minority individuals but have not yet directly tested intervention efficacy with these groups (Bingham & Ward, 1997; Heppner & Heppner, 2003). Actual research on the efficacy of these approaches is sorely needed. For instance, what are the mechanisms that underlie counselors' metacognitive processes in career counseling and are they moderated by clients' presenting career concerns? We encourage vocational researchers to empirically examine the elements of what constitutes effective career interventions with racial/ethnic minority group members, incorporating the influence of the counselor's cultural contexts on the efficacy of culturally appropriate career counseling. We believe that metacognition is a useful concept to operationalize, thereby enabling the empirical examination of the role of counselors' culture in career counseling.

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Angela M. Byars-Winston, Department of Counseling Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Nadya A. Fouad, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Angela M. Byars-Winston, Department of Counseling Psychology, 1000 Bascom Mall, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706 (e-mail: [e-mail]).