Assignment: Ethics in Psychology Course
Part I-
Directions: Respond to the questions in 100 words. You must cite your references and must provide original work. Please remember this is a psychology ethics class, therefore; the responses must reflect the class.
1. Why is the selection of culturally neutral assessment tools so critical to the ethical practice of psychology?
2. What potential harm can result if assessment materials are culture-bound?
3. What potential limitations do you foresee encountering with culturally neutral assessment tools?
4. According to the APA Ethics Code, what conditions would justify termination of therapy?
5. Do you agree with the prohibitions of termination of therapy? Why or why not?
6. List another reason why you agree or disagree with the prohibitions?
7. Provide citation and reference to the material(s) you discuss. Describe what you found interesting regarding this topic, and why.
8. Describe what may be unclear to you, and what you would like to learn.
Part II-
Directions: Please complete the attached worksheet. You must use cite references used in-text. Must be original work and cite all work! The scenario is found below!
Scenario: Case 7 Handling Disparate Information for Evaluating Trainees
Rashid Vaji, PhD, a member of the school psychology faculty at a midsize university, serves as a faculty supervisor for students assigned to externships in schools. The department has formalized a supervision and evaluation system for the extern program. Students have weekly individual meetings with the faculty supervisor and biweekly meetings with the on-site supervisor. The on-site supervisor writes a midyear (December) and end of academic year (May) evaluation of each student. The site evaluations are sent to Dr. Vaji, and he provides feedback based on the site and his own supervisory evaluation to each student. The final grade (fail, low pass, pass, high pass) is the responsibility of Dr. Vaji.
Dr. Vaji also teaches the spring semester graduate class Health Disparities in Mental Health. One of the course requirements is for students to write weekly thought papers, in which they take the perspective of therapy clients from different ethnic groups in reaction to specific session topics. Leo Watson, a second-year graduate student, is one of Dr. Vaji's externship supervisees. He is also enrolled in the Health Disparities course. Leo's thought papers often present ethnic-minority adolescents as prone to violence and unable to grasp the insights offered by school psychologists. In a classroom role-playing exercise, Leo plays an ethnic-minority student client as slumping in his chair, not understanding the psychologist, and giving angry retorts. In written comments on these thought papers and class feedback, Dr. Vaji encourages Leo to incorporate more of the readings on racial/ethnic discrimination and multicultural competence into his papers and to provide more complex perspectives on clients.
One day during his office hours, three students from the class come to Dr. Vaji's office to complain about Leo's behavior outside the classroom. They describe incidents in which Leo uses derogatory ethnic labels to describe his externship clients and brags about "putting one over" on his site supervisors by describing these clients in "glowing" terms just to satisfy his supervisors' "stupid do-good" attitudes. They also report an incident at a local bar at which Leo was seen harassing an African American waitress, including by using racial slurs.
After the students have left his office, Dr. Vaji reviews his midyear evaluation and supervision notes on Leo and the midyear on-site supervisor's report. In his own evaluation report, Dr. Vaji had written, "Leo often articulates a strong sense of duty to help his ethnic minority students overcome past discrimination but needs additional growth and supervision in applying a multicultural perspective to his clinical work." The on-site supervisor's evaluation states that Leo has a wonderful attitude toward his student clients. . . . Unfortunately, evaluation of his multicultural treatment skills is limited because Leo has had fewer cases to discuss than some of his peers, since a larger than usual number of ethnic minority clients have stopped coming to their sessions with him.
It is the middle of the spring semester, and Dr. Vaji still has approximately 6 weeks of supervision left with Leo. The students' complaints about Leo are consistent with what Dr. Vaji has observed in Leo's class papers and role-playing exercises. However, these complaints are very different from Leo's presentation during on-site supervision. If Leo has been intentionally deceiving both supervisors, then he may be more ineffective or harmful as a therapist to his current clients than either supervisor has realized. In addition, purposeful attempts to deceive the supervisors might indicate a personality disorder or lack of integrity that, if left unaddressed, might be harmful to adolescent clients in the future.
Ethical Dilemma
Dr. Vaji would like to meet with Leo to discuss, at a minimum, ways to retain adolescent clients and to improve his multicultural treatment skills. He does not know to what extent his conversation with Leo and final supervisory report should be influenced by the information provided by the other graduate students.
Part III-
This is a group assignment, however; I am responsible for only 1 slide. The slide must include detailed speaker notes and must also include information on the slide. Attached you will find a copy the group's PowerPoint. Please add to the PowerPoint and add the peer-reviewed references to the project.
Directions: Develop 1-Microsoft PowerPoint presentation with detailed speaker notes on the selection process of a culture-neutral assessment.
My Slide: Examples of when culture biased assessments have been problematic.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.