Development of the Multicultural Mental Health Awareness Scale

The present study describes the development of an instrument to assess the multicultural competencies of mental health professionals in Australia. The scale was developed to assess the effectiveness of a multicultural mental health training program. Mental health professionals from Queensland, Australia (N = 268) participated in the study by completing a questionnaire battery. Items on the new scale were generated to parallel the Queensland Transcultural Mental Health Centre (QTMHC) training program's objectives. The results describe a 35‐item Multicultural Mental Health Awareness Scale. Factor analysis of the scale indicated three factors of multicultural counselling competencies: Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills. These factors were in line with the Sue et al. (1982) multicultural counselling competencies. The scale has satisfactory internal consistency, test–retest reliability, concurrent validity, and discriminant validity and can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the multicultural competency training programs in mental health.