Clinical Biases - Li-Repac

Li-Repac; AIM

The aim was to compare the diagnoses of the white and Chinese-American therapists to white and Chinese male participants.

SHe hypothesized that therapists would generally agree on normality as they all had similar training.

Li-Repac; SAMPLE

Males; White and Chinese.

• All diagnoses with mental illness.

• They were controlled of age, social class, and their level of illness.

• All CHinese participants were born in China or Hong Kong.

Li-Repac; PROCEDURE

3 of the C patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia, 1 with neurotic, and 1 with reactive depression.

2 of the W patients were diagnosed with schizophrenic, 1 neurotic, 1 character disorder, and 1 reactive depression.

The research carried out semi-structured interviews with each participant. These were videotaped. They were questions like, “How have you been feeling lately?” and "How does a typical day in your life look like?”.

Each clinician was asked to first describe the ideal, functioning individual using a 112-item test.

There was no significant difference in the scores,

• which means that there were some training led to similar understandings of what was known to be “normal”

They were randomly assigned a videotape to rate the normality. Each rater would rate 4 videos; 2 white 2 Chinese.

They were asked to fill in an inventory to describe both personality traits and signs of illness.

Li-Repac; RESULTS

The W tended to see signs of lower self-esteem in the C participants.

The C tended to see the W as more aggressive.

• W raters saw C participants as more depressed and shy than the C-A raters.

• W raters saw C participants as less socially capable and having less space for interpersonal relationships

• C-A raters reported more severe illnesses than did the W raters when judging quieter participants.

Li-Repac; WHAT DOES THIS SHOW

It shows clinical biases as there were cultural biases that came into play. The C-A raters found the W participants more aggressive, as they spoke more. However, like in their society you don’t really do thta so that’s why it stood out.

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Well we can conclude that we should view and take this study in with caution. However, it does support the idea that there are cultural biases in diagnosing, and more research should be done to test the validity.

Li-Repac; EVALUATION

1. There was no pre-test on stereotyping

2. The sample size was small

3. The patients that were videotaped had different disorders

4. There were a lot of variations of adjectives used by the clinicians.