Racial-Cultural Events in Group Therapy as Perceived by Group Therapists

This qualitative study explored the nature of the retrospective experiences of helpful and difficult racial-cultural events in group therapy as perceived by eight White group therapists and six group therapists of color who had a minimum of 5 years of experience working in a variety of group therapy settings. Racial-cultural events are incidents, interactions, or processes in a therapy group that are interpreted as related to or influenced by visible racial dimensions, and any stereotypes and assumptions pertaining to those dimensions. Participants completed demographic questionnaires and in-depth, semistructured telephone interviews. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed, and then the transcriptions were analyzed using grounded theory, resulting in three main emergent themes: (a) helpful events, (b) mixed events, and (c) hindering events. Study findings provide insight into effective group therapy with multicultural populations and offer directions for future research.