| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 初等教育學系輔導教學碩士班（88~89） === 91 === The purpose of this research was to explore the ways in which multicultural counseling and therapy altered a young person’s attitude toward stealing. Here, the researcher also played the role of the counselor. A fifth-grade boy who had a long history of stealing behavior was given a total of fourteen counseling sessions. These sessions were tape recorded and transcribed for further analyses using grounded theory. Case study was utilized to document the changes in the subject’s behavior while he underwent counseling and therapy. The results of our study could be summarized as follows.
The reason why the subject under study had engaged in stealing behavior in the past could be traced to a multitude of factors stemming from the subject’s personality and his sense of values as shaped by the environment and the circumstances under which he grew up. During the counseling process, researcher discovered that the subject’s sense of values as well as his views towards money, property right, and the law were fundamentally changed or re-constructed. An effective deterrence was found in the case where the subject’s potential victims began to protect their money more carefully, so that stealing as a way of obtaining “easy money” became a less attractive avenue for the subject. The more the subject engaged in the act of stealing, the more hardened he became. Stealing became routine, and the subject pretended that nothing had happened after each criminal act. Reinforced by the monetary gains from stealing, the subject stole repeatedly. He spent all of the stolen money quickly and committed theft again. Only his arrest by the authorities finally put an end to this vicious cycle.
During counseling, the subject showed three types of feelings: positive, non-positive and ambiguous feelings. The subject’s behavior could also be categorized into three types: positive, non-positive and ambiguous behaviors. The non-positive behaviors included denial and isolation, suppression and isolation, resistance and delay, regression, projection, and quasi-projection. The subject showed three types of cognition: insight and work through, inconsistent description of the truth, and inconsistent description of now and before.
Upon reevaluation, there were five areas in which the counselor could improve with respect to the way she conducted the multicultural counseling and therapy. First of all, the counselor should be aware of the differences in values between herself and the subject. Second, the counselor should be aware that her own values affected the counseling process. Third, the counselor should thrive to engage in more effective communication and to provide intervention strategies. Fourth, the counselor should take the responsibility of educating the subject, so that he would have a more reasonable expectation of the goals of counseling as well as a better understanding of the counselor’s orientations and the subject’s legal rights. Fifth, the counselor should be more sensitive to the conflicts between the counseling approaches and the multicultural values and should recognize the limits of their competence and expertise; she should be willing to refer out to more experienced counselors when necessary. In particular, the counselor should put more emphasis on improving the first two areas, as discussed above.
The details of the results were discussed, the suggestions for further research and the implications for counseling practices were proposed.
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