ABSTRACT
Social Constructionist inquiry offers a perspective for understanding relationships among Chinese American family members, and a framework for carrying out therapeutic strategies. Traditionally, clinicians worked with Chinese families from a logical-positivist paradigm. The paradigm emphasizes absolute knowledge, therapist as expert, deficits in the family and change due to therapeutic intervention. Social constructionist inquiry emphasizes how the family uses language in talking about a situation. It also is concerned with evolution of the family’s story, therapist as collaborator, family strengths and change due to a revision in the family’s story about its experience. Ethnography and Multivocal Ethnography, grounded in social constructionist inquiry, are two approaches emphasizing interviewing questions in creating a context where families can tell their 112stories and work to revise the way experience is understood and discussed. The emphasis is not on the family being the problem, but how the family talks about a situation. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: getinfo@haworth.com]
