Contributions of education and training, diversity experience, and demographic characteristics to counseling students' ethnocultural empathy dimensions

For decades, theoretical and empirical literature has provided overwhelming agreement that empathy is central to the counseling process and the counseling relationship. Multicultural research has indicated the need for counselors to become multiculturally competent yet has failed to address empathy assessment in meeting the needs of an emerging diverse community. The purpose of this study was to describe students' perceptions of empathy from a multicultural perspective and to predict the contributions of education and training, diversity experience, and demographic characteristics to the understanding of those perceptions. Participants consisted of 193 master's level counseling students completing the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE), the Multicultural Counseling Inventory (MCI), the Diversity Experience Questionnaire, and a demographic questionnaire. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that education and training predictors accounted for 27% of the variance in ethnocultural empathy, controlling for diversity experience and demographic characteristics. Standardized regression coefficients indicated that multicultural knowledge and awareness were the most important predictors of ethnocultural empathy, followed by diversity experience and race/ethnicity. Results suggest that counseling students' general multicultural counseling competence and diversity experience may play important roles in helping students become ethnoculturally empathic. The findings provide a more comprehensive and multidimensional model for the assessment of empathy and multicultural development among counseling students.