Abstract

Culturally Diverse Children and Adolescents: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment, by Ian A. Canino and Jeanne Spurlock, is a somewhat misleading title for this book because it implies that cultural differences in children and adolescents and how one takes these differences into consideration in cross-cultural health care are the authors’ primary concern. A more appropriate title would emphasize that the focus of the book is on children and adolescents from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, some of whom are also from different cultures. Many terms can be used interchangeably to describe the cultural diversity of the American population: race, skin color, minority, and ethnic group. Culture is generally defined as the values and behaviors of a specific group of people. In discussions of multiculturalism, cultural group usually refers to the race or ethnicity of a group of people. Although low socioeconomic status, regardless of race, can certainly specify a group of people, it is not generally considered a cultural group. The focus of this work by Canino and Spurlock is on four specific child and adolescent cultural populations: African–American, Latino/Latina, Asian–American, and American–Indian "who encounter multiple social stressors and whose families represent the nation’s lower socioeconomic levels" . This last statement is a generalization that does not speak to the tremendous variability within these four cultural groups. Not all children from non-White cultures reside in economically disadvantaged inner-city families . In any clinical assessment of a child or adolescent, mental health professionals try to differentiate physiological, developmental, and environmental factors. Because children from minority or underrepresented groups are more likely than those from the majority culture to encounter poverty and various social stressors, the authors seek to help clinicians to distinguish culture-specific behavior from behavior associated with low socioeconomic level. Low socioeconomic status is not synonymous with minority group status. Therefore, a more accurate title for this book would emphasize working with children and adolescents from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, not culturally diverse backgrounds