ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the framework that guides our efforts to provide cross-cultural friendship opportunities for children and adolescents through pairs. It seeks to explicitly articulate the uniqueness of pairs as a medium for cross-cultural counseling and the development of intergroup understanding. The term structural development refers to the level of complexity present in social cognition and the degree of perspective-taking present in interpersonal or intergroup understanding. The intergroup understanding framework can be helpful in promoting cultural identity development among youth. The chapter examines the use of pairs to enlarge the world-views of children and adolescents who differ from each other in terms of one or more cultural memberships, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and religious affiliation. It also describes two structural-developmental models of cultural understanding, one of which we consider ontical and the other ontological; but both are structural in that they represent varying degrees of social-cognitive complexity.
