More etic and enic assessment issues

I am beginning to think that assessment issues don't get the scrutiny that they deserve from ethical and ethnic perspectives, and from my learning about genetic research that is supported by imaging (fMRI, for instance) we are on the verge of many new psychological concepts--assessment will have to catch up.

The irony is this; you will see in the research methods class evidence that assessment is the opposite side of the research coin.  In the Handbook of Multicultural Counseling,  Ponterotto, Suzuki, Casas, and Alexander (2009) seem to reach the core of assessment ethics (in an ethnic context) with language that requires several readings to fully comprehend.  By showing that assessment is a research method that actually studies assessment itself from a moral perspective, they show that the ethical assessment process is not what we believe subjectively to be moral, but what is shown to be moral by research itself (p. 148).  This connects ethics and morals in an objective way that seems to assure us that morals are a real thing, and, as such will ultimately show up as in imaging.  From this visual evidence will come assessment instruments, and I suspect that these instruments will look much different than the instruments we have been using for decades. 

What is interesting is that is that they feel compelled to give this view in the context of ethnicity, and it is certainly the experience of Margaret-Lynn, existing assessment is inadequate for stressed multicultural environments.  They suggest that there is an etic (Lett, 2008) future for assessment (based on the scientific study of morality), and, as such, my conclusion is that present-day assessment that is etic, has to be applied in a emic way at the discretion the counsellors.  In other words, assessments have to be used as tools, just like any other tool, to solve issues rather than reach high-minded conclusions.  To make matters more complicated for multicultural assessment, emic strategies may have to be developed that may not be directly culturally linked based on previous research, but have to be based on current experiences with the types of newly fused cultures that immigrants, especially youth, create themselves as part of normal human experience.  From my perspective, we are waiting for Science for better etic assessment in ethic environments, and have to make the best of what we have by creating our own emic applications and strategies from existing etic assessment instruments.

References

Lett, J. (2008). Emic/etic distinctions. Retreived from http://faculty.irsc.edu/FACULTY/JLett/Article%20on%20Emics%20and%20Etics.htmhttp://faculty.irsc.edu/FACULTY/JLett/Article%20on%20Emics%20and%20Etics.htm

Ponterotto, J. G., Suzuki, L. A., Casas, J. M., & Alexander, C. M. (2010). Handbook of multicultural counseling. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications.