The cultural grid: A complicated and dynamic approach to multicultural counseling

The cultural grid differentiates between personal and cultural elements of a multicultural situation. It combines the social system variables of ethnographic, demographic, status, and affiliation with personal cognitive variables of behavior, expectation and value. The resulting personal cultural orientation will display the complicated range of dynamic and salient cultures in a person's background which influence behaviors, expectations and values at an intrapersonal level. The grid also differentiates between personal (different expectation but same behavior) and cultural (same expectation but different behavior) interactions on an interpersonal level.