Abstract

Multicultural counseling is an important aspect in counseling. The introduction of the multicultural counseling competencies was a major step to improve counseling services among school counselors. However, there is a lack of valid and reliable instrument to measure multicultural counseling competencies in Malaysian context. This initial study focuses on the development of a local instrument to assess multicultural counseling competencies among Malaysian school counselors. This instrument consists of 42 items and it was administered to 212 secondary school counselors in Negeri Sembilan and Wilayah Persekutuan, Kuala Lumpur. Principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted in which items within initial dimensions of multicultural counseling competencies were reshuffled and checked for their psychometric properties. After series of principal component analysis (PCA) and analysis from the experts, three dimensions of multicultural counseling competencies with 28 items were formed. This paper also discusses the findings and its implication to the instrument development and the validation process.

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