Culture and Diversity among Occupational Therapists in Ireland: When the Therapist is the ‘Diverse’ One
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Literature in occupational therapy, although paying increased attention to cultural differences and diversity, has largely ignored the situation of therapists who are themselves members of social and cultural minority groups. ‘Difference’ is assumed to be exclusively an attribute of the client. Method: This qualitative study explored the professional experiences of 12 occupational therapists in Ireland who self-identified as disabled or ethnic minority group members. Findings: Participants reported challenges with colleagues and managers, which revolved primarily around cultural differences in the norms and expectations guiding social interactions, communications and practice styles. Overt discrimination was reported only by disabled therapists. With clients, again there were clashes of cultural values, but participants also experienced overt and covert prejudice and intolerance. This was particularly difficult to respond to in the context of client-centred practice. Conclusion: Cultural competence, as the prevailing approach to diversity, emphasises suspending one's own values to facilitate those of clients. This demand may be inappropriate for minority therapists who may face prejudice and discrimination. In contrast, cultural humility and critical reflexivity emphasise negotiating values in the context of social power relations, an approach that may better position occupational therapy to benefit from a diverse workforce.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".