Abstract:

Malaysia is a multiracial country consisting of people from various races, religions, and descent. Generally, the nearly 32.6 million of Malaysia’s population consists of three main races which are Malay, Chinese, and Indian, as well as other minorities that include the diverse indigenous peoples of Sabah and Sarawak. This diversity also indirectly affects the counselling services in Malaysia. In such a multiracial country, counsellors or mental health service providers cannot seem to avoid providing counselling services to individuals of different races and cultures. Therefore, it is important for counsellors to have a better understanding of multicultural issues or also known as multicultural counseling competencies in the helping profession. The main objective of this study is to examine the competency of counselling trainees in multicultural counselling and its construct. Secondly, this study examines the multicultural counselling ability of the counsellor trainees based on gender. This research used the survey method approach for data collection to answer the objectives of this study. A set of questionnaires called “Multicultural Counselling Competencies Scale”, developed to measure the level of counselling competencies among counselling teachers from secondary schools in Malaysia, was used in this study. The 26-items questionnaires were distributed using the 11-point scale ranging from 1 as “Strongly Disagree” to 11 as “Strongly Agree”. The Cronbach alpha for reliability analysis showed high reliability value at .92. The population for this research consisted of final year students whom are currently in their bachelor’s degree level at Malaysian public universities. At this moment, there are nine public universities that offer counselling training programs in the bachelor’s degree level. The total number of final year students in the research population was 523. The research team has reached out to selected universities for approval and cooperation in order to get the final year students in their counselling programs to be involved in this research. Cluster random sampling was used to select the sample for this study. Out of nine universities, six public universities were randomly selected using a cluster sampling method that involved 290 students (n=290). Each student from the selected universities volunteered to participate in this research. The six public universities involved were University of Malaya, International Islamic University of Malaysia, University Malaysia Sarawak, Sultan Idris University of Education, University of Terengganu Malaysia, and University of Islamic Sciences Malaysia. Data collected were analysed using SPSS ver. 22. Descriptive analysis and t-test were conducted to determine the level of multicultural counseling competency and the different levels of competency based on gender.
The study found overall high competency (Mean=8.10) of trainees in multicultural counselling. Counsellor trainees also scored high on the subscale of awareness (Mean=7.70), knowledge (Mean=8.55), and skills (Mean=7.91) for multicultural counselling. In terms of gender, t-test analysis indicated no significant difference concerning the level of multicultural counselling competency among male and female counsellor trainees. Findings from this study put emphasis on universities to the significance of competency in multicultural counselling in counselling training.

Keywords:

Competency in counselling, multicultural counselling competencies, counselling training, counsellor trainees.