Aging Times - Winter 2007


	Vol. 2, No. 1 · Winter 2007

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Diversity and Aging: New Perspectives on Cultural Competence
By Molly Everett Davis

A social work student recently asked me a question in response to a classroom discussion on cultural competence. “Are you telling me that social workers are expected to be culturally competent with clients regardless of their ethnicity, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, spirituality or socioeconomic status? Is that possible?”

Social workers are facing new challenges in our understanding of and in effectively intervening with the diverse populations we serve. We are expected to be culturally-competent, but what does that mean and what does it require? As someone committed to working effectively with older adults, I believe it requires us to develop new perspectives on diversity that include understanding the centrality of age in shaping values, beliefs, norms, behavioral patterns and lifeways. We need new conceptual models that cut across multiple categories of diversity and help us understand how diversity impacts people throughout their life course trajectory and across generations. This is the requirement of cultural competence in the 21st century.

The lifeways framework (Davis, 2003) is one such model that has potential to help understand individual difference that cuts across multiple forms of diversity. It challenges the notion of stereotypes and promotes the need for understanding rather than judgment. It is based upon the ecological processes of person and environment transactions that produce adaptive responses. These responses can be called lifeways. Lifeways are reflected in values, traditions, rituals, behaviors and customs that can be unique to the individual or may be in common with others. In fact, culture really represents the lifeways of an individual or group.

I recently spent some time with my mother during the holidays and faced a lifeways challenge. My mother, who was raised during the Depression, is extremely frugal and consistently demands that we eat all of our food at each meal. Any leftovers are to be consumed at the next meal. Since my immediate family, including teen sons, has had different lifeways and hate leftovers, you can imagine the clash of lifeways. This recent experience demonstrates the uniqueness of lifeways and the role of age, socio-economic, gender, ethnicity and historical context in shaping them. If a social work professional were called upon to understand my mother’s concerns about food, it would be necessary to understand the context of the development of her lifeways. She might share commonalities with others raised during the Depression,such as frugality and distrust of banks, but she might also have some unique lifeways, such as cooking small portions to ensure not wasting food, figuring out ways to reuse “disposable” plates and baggies or putting so much emphasis on saving money that she denies herself comfort items.

Approaches to diversity that help us appreciate individual differences as well as commonalities that exist among each of us provide the key to real cultural competence. Meeting this challenge requires an openness toward a process of lifelong learning that sees each encounter with a client as a new opportunity to learn about their lifeways and to provide the best and most appropriate intervention for effective service delivery. This is the challenge of real cultural competence as we work with diverse aging populations.

Davis, M. (2003). Module on Cultural Competence, developed for SAGE- SW Faculty Development Institute, Council on Social Work Education and John A. Hartford Project.

Dr. Molly Davis is an Associate Professor at George Mason University, where she is the Director of BSW Field Education. She also has served as a Gero-Ed Center Expert Trainer and a GeroRich Project Director.