Cultural Humility with Religious and Spiritually Diverse Women of Color Clients: A Psychometric Analysis

Cultural humility, as part of a therapist’s multicultural orientation, can help facilitate a strong working alliance with clients across diverse cultural backgrounds. Given that little research has attended to how the intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion/spirituality (R/S) influence counseling dyads, we tested the factor structure and provided evidence for the reliability and construct validity of the Cultural Humility Scale (CHS) with a sample of R/S diverse women of color (N = 288). To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the factor structure of the CHS with such a sample. We utilized a confirmatory factor analysis that revealed the original theoretical model and two-factor structure of the CHS yielded acceptable fit to the data and all items significantly loaded on their respective factors. Moreover, CHS scores had strong positive associations with client perceptions of therapists’ multicultural competencies and feminist orientation. No mean differences in perceptions of therapist cultural humility were found by R/S or racial/ethnic identity. Implications for research, theory, and clinical practice are discussed.