ting and continuous human group, which is part and parcel of the personal reality. Triandis, Bontemplo, Leung & Hui (1990 cited in Pedersen 1994) distinguished between demographic, cultural and personal constructs. Cultural constructs they identified as being shared by group of people, who live in the same geographical location at the same time, speak the same dialect and shared the same norms, roles, values and ways to describe experience. Demographic constructs deal with the same topics, but when shared by a particular demographic group within a culture, such as men and women, young and old. Personal constructs belong to another category of individual differences and cannot be meaningfully interpreted with references to the cultural and demographic membership. Each of the three constructs are closely related with the others, but they should be examined independently. Counselling in this case should take into account cultural and demographic differences, but work on a personal level. Contrary to this view stands Hofstede( 1986, 1992 cited in Pedersen 1996) who described three factors or dimensions that constitute and influence culture. The first concept is individualism-collectivism- a person experiences himself as a self-contained unique entity, striving to attain his or her own goals and to realize his or her own aspirations. In a collectivist environment a person finds himself part of social network of life-lasting relationships, from which he or she cannot or does not want to be removed. This ambiguity leads to change in the expression of attitudes and values in the social arena. Power construct is a construct that refers to the gap that separates superiors from subordinates and is assessed on the acceptance versus rejection of inequality in status, income and power. The third concept is the masculinity-femininity on the basis of a differentiation of occupational gender roles. In broader terms, masculine cultures are orientated to...
