Psychological Assessment of API College Students
Despite the common portrayal of Asian and Pacific Islander (API) students as the "model minority," the API student can suffer psychological problems like any other college student. According to some researchers, the counseling needs of API students may be more difficult to discern, given the uniqueness of the API student population.
A recent study focuses on this issue by analyzing one tool for psychological assessment, the Outcome Questionnaire-45 (or OQ-45). "The OQ-45 is a brief, 45-item self-report inventory of mental health status designed to assess the potential need for treatment and to track the progress of clients in therapy on a session-by-session basis...Possible total scores, ranging from 0 to 180, are based on a continuum, with nonclinical (normal) at the low end and clinical (disturbed) at the high end...Previous criteria...estimated an OQ-45 total score of 64 points as the cutoff..." [p.198] Some of the major points of the study are as follows:
- The study used "normative OQ-45 data...from prior research with undergraduate students of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where approximately 92% of the students in the sample were Caucasian (N=235, M=42.15, SD=16.61)..." [p.198]
- The researchers recruited another sample of college students (from BYU-Hawaii, a college where international students are 45% of its enrollment) that allowed them to obtain mean scores for 15 ethnic/cultural groups. In this new sample of students, the mean scores for the Asian subgroup were computed (N=164, M=56.0, SD=16.0) along with the scores for Pacific Islanders (N=242, M=48.7, SD=18.7). [p.200]
- "...the one-way ANOVA for the 15 ethnic/cultural groups and the normative sample also yielded significant differences, F(15, 714) = 5.37, p < .01, with Fisher's LSD indicating that several of the Asian and Pacific Islander subgroups scored significantly higher than did Caucasians and the normative sample. The Chinese and Korean subgroups reported the highest means and showed the greatest number of differences from the other ethnic/cultural groups in the analysis..." [pp. 199-200]
- "Because the OQ-45 is widely used in diverse settings across populations, the value of currently derived cutoff scores and related decision rules must be validated with all groups that come in contact with the OQ-45 to ensure appropriate clinical treatment... Findings of the present study suggest that for the OQ-45, socioracial, ethnic, and cultural differences should be interpreted with caution because elevated scores may or may not indicate a higher prevalence of psychological problems. Future studies should use larger samples, which would permit exploratory factor analysis, multisample confirmatory analyses, and discriminant analyses to better assess the appropriateness of current norms..." [pp. 201-203]
Additional analysis of the OQ-45 may need to distinguish between API students who are international students and API students who are second-generation (or more long-term in residence here). Another potential area of validation may be the instrument's Likert scale format, which past research has indicated may involve cultural biases.
Ann T. Gregersen (deceased), R. Scott Nebeker, Kenneth L. Seely, and Michael J. Lambert document their study in an article ("Social Validation of the Outcome Questionnaire-45: An Assessment of Asian and Pacific Islander College Students") in the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development (Vol.32, October 2004, pp. 194-205). Gregersen was a doctoral candidate in counseling psychology at Brigham Young University. Nebeker, Seely, and Lambert work in the Department of Clinical Psychology at BYU in Provo, Utah. The article includes a concise summary of related research on API mental health and more than thirty references.
[Abstract done by Willard Hom, Director, Research & Planning Unit, System Office, California Community Colleges, 2/25/05]
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