NR 394 Week 3 Cultural Assessment Interview Write-Up Example

One Woman, One Group: A Cultural Assessment of a Vietnamese American Mother in Her Fifties

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 394: Transcultural Nursing

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Woman, One Group: A Cultural Assessment of a Vietnamese American Mother in Her Fifties

The Group, With Edges

The group for this assessment is Vietnamese Americans of the first generation who arrived in the United States as children or young adults between 1980 and 1995, now in their late forties to early sixties, living in a large metropolitan area in Texas with an established Vietnamese community, and speaking Vietnamese at home and English at work. These edges matter. A Vietnamese American who arrived as a refugee adult in 1975, one born in the United States in 2000 and one who arrived in 2015 would differ in language, religion, health beliefs and experience of the health care system, and a description of all three together could only be written in generalities. Within the chosen group, there is still wide variation by religion, which includes Buddhism, Catholicism and ancestor veneration practiced alongside either, by education and by region of origin in Vietnam.

Access, Stated Plainly

The person interviewed, called Mrs. N. here, is 54, keeps the books for a small dental practice, and is the mother of a nursing student in the writer's cohort. She agreed to a one-hour conversation for this assignment, understood that her name and identifying details would not be used, and chose to meet at her kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon. She spoke in English, switching to Vietnamese for a few words, which her daughter translated. The writer is not Vietnamese American, which shaped what Mrs. N. chose to explain and what she assumed the writer already knew.

The Domains, Named Before Findings

The interview followed the six cultural phenomena in the transcultural assessment model of Giger and Haddad (2021): communication, space, social organization, time orientation, environmental control and biological variations. Naming the domains before the findings keeps the write-up from becoming a list of whatever came up in conversation.

Findings by Domain

Communication: Mrs. N. said she avoids disagreeing openly with doctors and nurses, out of respect, and will nod even when she does not understand, then ask her daughter later. She described this as politeness rather than agreement, a distinction a nurse could easily miss.

Space: She is comfortable with physical examination by female clinicians and prefers not to be examined by men for gynecologic care, but will accept it if necessary.

Social organization: Health decisions in her family are discussed among the adults, and her husband and eldest daughter are consulted for anything serious. Her own mother, now 80 and living with the family, is cared for at home, and Mrs. N. said that placing her in a facility would be shameful.

Time orientation: She described herself as planning for the future, especially for her children's education, but said she rarely goes for check-ups unless something is wrong.

Environmental control: Mrs. N. uses both Western medicine and traditional remedies. When she or her children have a cold or body aches, she practices cao gió, rubbing oiled skin with a coin to draw out what she called bad wind, which leaves red streaks on the back or chest. She was careful to say that she would also take medicine from a doctor if the illness was serious.

Biological variations: She knows that she has chronic hepatitis B, diagnosed during a pregnancy, and that her mother also has it. Chronic hepatitis B is more common among people born in Southeast Asia than in the general United States population, and she said her doctor checks her liver every year.

What the Findings Mean for Nursing Care

Three findings have direct consequences for a nurse caring for Mrs. N. First, her habit of nodding without agreement means that teach-back matters more than asking whether she understands; a nurse who asks do you have any questions will probably hear no, and an instruction will seem accepted when it was not. Second, cao gió leaves marks that a clinician unfamiliar with the practice could mistake for bruising from injury or abuse, particularly on a child; knowing to ask about home remedies before interpreting marks is an assessment skill, not a courtesy. Third, her family's involvement in decisions means that a plan made with Mrs. N. alone may be revised at home, and that including her husband or eldest daughter, with her permission, would make the plan more likely to be followed. Leininger's culture care theory calls this kind of care culturally congruent: care that fits the person's values and ways of life rather than requiring her to abandon them (Leininger & McFarland, 2006).

Her hepatitis B also carries a family dimension that a nurse should raise carefully. Because hepatitis B can pass from mother to child at birth, her adult children should know their own status, and her grandchildren's vaccination matters. Mrs. N. said she had never discussed the diagnosis with her children because it felt private and a little shameful. A nurse could offer to explain, with her permission, why testing family members helps rather than blames, which fits her own strong sense of responsibility for her family's future. Framing testing as care for the family, rather than as an individual medical task, is likely to be more acceptable to her than a leaflet handed over at discharge. She agreed that this was worth trying.

Limits of One Conversation

One interview with one person cannot describe a group. Mrs. N. is Catholic, which shaped some of her answers about family and illness in ways that would differ for a Buddhist woman of the same age, and she is comfortable in English, which is not true of many women in her generation. Her daughter's presence may also have shaped what she said. The assessment should therefore be read as an account of one person, placed against the edges of a group, rather than as evidence about Vietnamese Americans in general. The next step, a care plan, will draw only on what Mrs. N. said, not on what the writer might assume about people like her. Tervalon and Murray-García (1998) warn that treating cultural knowledge as a finished body of facts about groups leads clinicians to stop asking; the more useful stance is humility, treating each patient as the expert on her own beliefs. This write-up tries to keep that stance by reporting what Mrs. N. said rather than what her group is supposed to believe.

References

Giger, J. N., & Haddad, L. (2021). Transcultural nursing: Assessment and intervention (8th ed.). Elsevier.

Leininger, M. M., & McFarland, M. R. (2006). Culture care diversity and universality: A worldwide nursing theory (2nd ed.). Jones and Bartlett.

Tervalon, M., & Murray-García, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117-125. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2010.0233