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.