Changing Multicultural Guidelines: Clinical and Research Implications for Evidence-Based Psychotherapies

The American Psychological Association's (APA) release of the multicultural guidelines (APA Multicultural guidelines: An ecological approach to context, identity and intersectionality, 2017, http://www.apa.org/about/policy/multicultural-guidelines.pdf; APA guidelines on race and ethnicity in psychology: Promoting responsiveness and equity, 2019, http://www.apa.org/about/policy/race-and-ethnicity-inpsychology.pdf) is a welcome advance to the conceptualization and practice of culture in psychology. These guidelines mark a significant expansion of the previous Multicultural Guidelines (APA Guidelines on multicultural education, training, research, practice and organizational change for psychologists, 2002). It is argued that changes in these guidelines are substantial enough to constitute a paradigmatic shift with significant implications and challenges for the development of evidence-based psychotherapies (EBPs). Furthermore, these guidelines are particularly timely and applicable to cope with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, social/racial unrest, and in promoting international collaborations. However, in the process of broadening cultural approaches, confusion is created in already contested, imperfect, and evolving cultural concepts. The goal of this article is to clarify and examine this emerging paradigm that is herein called cultural EBPs and is differentiated from its two predecessors, universal EBPs and racial and ethnic minority EBPs. Each paradigm is distinguished by describing APA multicultural guidelines and contrasting two dimensions extended from the treatment match model that underlies EBPs. These two dimensions are (a) main cultural assumptions and (b) methods and evidence.