The resiliency wheel: A training model for enhancing the effectiveness of cross-cultural interviews

The Resiliency Wheel provides interview guidance to counselors in training. The interview format provides enough structure for beginning counselors to feel comfortable with the questions, but offers flexibility to more experienced counselors as they formulate new questions as the client's story unfolds. The Resiliency Wheel provides a way for counselors to link individual client strengths while drawing from the following factors: person, family, community, spirit, and culture. A diagram of the resiliency wheel can be used to record client information. The questions allow the counselor in training to become familiar with other cultures and worldviews. This awareness increases a counselor's cultural sensitivity and empathy around issues of oppression, discrimination, and racism due to one's ethnicity. The student counselor is given the opportunity to ask specific questions about a culture and realize the differences, but also the similarities between the counselor and the client. The Resiliency Wheel assists the counselor to develop a holistic understanding of the client and to be able to reflect this understanding to the client visually as well as verbally. The interview process in itself can bring about a deeper sharing of client identity and experience, contributing to the bond between client and counselor. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.