Cultural Brokerage As Ethical Labor: Korean American Social Workers in Trauma-Informed Practice

Background and Purpose
Trauma-informed care (TIC) emphasizes empowerment, safety, and collaboration. Yet for Korean American (KA) clients, dominant TIC frameworks often conflict with cultural norms that discourage emotional disclosure, prioritize family harmony, and avoid Western diagnostic language. This mismatch places KA social workers in the role of cultural brokers—translating, negotiating, and absorbing ethical tensions between institutional models and community realities. This study explores how KA social workers experience this role, and through a scholarly lens, conceptualizes it as a form of ethical labor, raising critical questions about professional burden, cultural attunement, and institutional accountability.

Methods
Using hermeneutic phenomenology, this qualitative study explored the lived experiences of 13 KA social workers providing TIC to KA clients in the U.S. Each participant completed two semi-structured interviews (26 total). Data were coded thematically and interpreted through sense-making theory and the cultural-ecological model of health. Analytic attention was given to how participants negotiated ethical, cultural, and institutional expectations in practice.

Results
Participants described cultural brokerage as central to their practice, yet often invisible within institutional expectations. This labor included:

• Translating trauma discourse in culturally resonant ways (e.g., han, hwabyung),
• Navigating tensions between Western clinical norms and Korean relational ethics (e.g., jeong),
  
• Advocating for clients within institutions that often misread Korean American cultural norms as dysfunction or noncompliance,
• Managing expectations when clients selected them based on ethnic or linguistic similarity,
• Using nunchi to discern whether trauma language would be helpful or harmful.

One participant shared: “I didn’t go into this thinking I would be translating cultural realities all the time, but that’s basically what I do every day.”

Another said: “Sometimes I feel like an advocate first, and a social worker second. The work I do feels so far removed from the way social work was taught to me in school.”

Participants described emotional fatigue, professional isolation, and a lack of institutional support or supervisory space to process these tensions.

Conclusions and Implications
This study reframes cultural brokerage not merely as a culturally responsive adaptation but as ethical labor - a relational, moral, and institutional responsibility disproportionately shouldered by bicultural practitioners. Findings underscore the need for trauma-informed frameworks to move beyond surface-level cultural adaptation and toward structural accountability. Social work education should prepare clinicians to recognize, name, and redistribute this labor by embedding culturally situated ethics, critical reflexivity, and institutional supports into training and supervision.