Diversity and Social Justice in Couple and Family Therapy Training: An Evaluation of Accredited Programs
Abstract
Over the past 15 years, the literature in the field of couple and family therapy (CFT)
has called for training programs to make issues of social justice a central concern in the
training of couple and family therapists (Guanipa, 2003; Laszloffy & Hardy, 2000;
Leslie & McDowell, 2004; McGeorge, Carlson, Erickson, & Guttormson, 2006).
During that time the Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy
Education (COAMFTE) made several changes to the accreditation standards that
required programs to integrate social justice principles and practices into CFT training.
Recently, however, the COAMFTE removed many of these social justice requirements
from its most current accreditation standards. Most notably, programs are now able to
create their own definitions of diversity in addition to their own benchmarks for
achieving diversity. The purpose of this study was to examine how CFT programs are
currently defining diversity and whether or not those definitions are consistent with the
current feminist and social justice training literature. Nineteen participants from
different accredited CFT programs participated in the study. The results demonstrated
inconsistency in the ways that programs define diversity and an overall lack of
measureable benchmarks for achieving diversity.