Asian Americans' and African Americans' Initial Perceptions of Hispanic Counselors

✍ Scribed by Jairo N. Fuertes

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 826 KB
• Volume: 27
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0883-8534
• DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-1912.1999.tb00219.x

✦ Synopsis

This study examined the effects of Hispanic counselors' race and speech accent on Asian American and African American students' initial perceptions. Results show that students' gender, race, and level of "universal-diverse" orientation, along with counselors' speech accent, predicted students' initial perceptions of the counselors and of the counseling relationship.

First impressions have been found to be tenacious in interpersonal encounters (Asch, 1946; Marshall & Kratz, 1988). In counseling research, first impressions, often referred to as initial perceptions, have been found to remain stable over time and to effect the process and outcome of psychotherapy (Cantor & Mishel, 1979; Taylor, Fiske, Etcott, & Ruderman, 1978). Moreover, physical characteristics, such as race have been found to be sdient in early encounters. including psychotherapy, and to be easily encoded and powerful in shaping initial perceptions (Cantor & Mishel, 1979;Marshall & Kratz, 1988). Given this evidence, this study of cross-cultural counseling examined the initial perceptions that Asian American and African American respondents formed of Hispanic counselors. The counselors in this study were either White Hispanic, Mestizo Hispanic, or Black Hispanic, and in some conditions spoke English intelligibly but with a noticeable Spanish accent. The research questions investigated in this study were inspired and guided by literature on similarity effects for minority clients in therapy (Atkinson & Schein, 1986; Sue, Zane, & Young, 1994). by literature from social psychology and linguistics examining the effects of speech accents on receiver perceptions (Giles, 1970, Sebastian