Culturally Competent Family Therapy: A General Model

and Rogerio, should be helped to derive, from their existing repertoires, programs that will enable their respective systems to change and restore their simplicity. One possible strategy is to help Ileana derive, from values endorsed by her (such as individualism, independence, equality and utilitarianism), an attitude of tolerance and respect toward her family's traditional values. This does not mean that she has to hold these values, conform or blindly obey her father's orders. She can choose her own lifestyle. When she is at home, however, in direct contact with her father and aunts, she should avoid provoking them and should play the game according to their, rather than her, rules. Her new programs will be context dependent. This is likely to lead to lifting the pressure applied on her. For Rogerio, his daughter's independence can be reframed as a tangible proof of his own success. His mission, dictated by his parents, had been to lead his family along the road toward success in the United States and integration. His daughter's character and values give evidence to the fact that this goal has actually been reached.

This chapter concentrates on analysis of the diagnostic data collected with the instruments described in chapter 9. The analysis leads to an idiographic theory of the case, which provides the therapist with a solid basis for designing a culturally competent therapy with the family. A technique of semiotic microanalysis of observations and interviews is proposed. The stream of transcribed behavior is divided into activity units. Each activity unit or sequence of such units is assigned a semantic and a pragmatic interpretation.

Microananalyzed observations are macroanalyzed semantically and pragmatically. That is, generalized semantic patterns and pragmatic structures are inferred from the discrete semantically and pragmatically analyzed units. Techniques of semantic analysis, which reveal the main culturally determined meaning patterns the family imposes on its world of experience, are proposed in Tyler ( 1969). A particular technique, an adaptation of componential analysis, designed to reveal and describe the family's main emotional concerns, is presented. A particular pragmatic technique is also presented. Its purpose is to expose the family members' proximity and control goal with respect to each other and to the external environment, along with their strategic plans for reaching the goals, despite obstacles.

It is explained how the main culturally relevant family programs can be revealed and described, using the semantically and pragmatically analyzed observations and the other, unanalyzed diagnostic data. It is shown how bugs in the family programs can be identified. One has to search for the new unfamiliar information encountered by the system, the difficulties in processing this information experienced by the system and the errors in attempting to process this information. It is explained how the history of the case

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