10.1177/0011000004268636 THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST / January 2005 Wei, Heppner / WORKING ALLIANCE IN TAIWAN • International Forum Counselor and Client Predictors of the Initial Working Alliance: A Replication and Extension to Taiwanese Client–Counselor Dyads Meifen Wei Iowa State University P. Paul Heppner University of Missouri–Columbia One mission of the International Forum section in The Counseling Psychologist is to increase the globalization of counseling psychology (Leong & Ponterotto, 2003). The goals of this study are in line with this mission: (a) to replicate U.S. counseling research on the working alliance to Taiwan by examining clients’perceptions of their counselors’ credibility and (b) to extend the working-alliance literature by examining the role that counselors’problem-solving styles play in predicting the initial working alliance. Thirty- one counseling dyads from four counseling centers in Taiwan participated by completing inventories after their first counseling sessions. Results found that (a) clients’ percep- tions of their counselors’ credibility and (b) counselors’ perceptions of their problem- solving styles significantly predicted the client-rated, but not the counselor-rated, work- ing alliance. Counseling implications and recommendations for future research are discussed. Recently, there has been an increased awareness regarding the value of cross-cultural counseling research that replicates and extends U.S. findings to other countries and the culturally specific counseling approaches practiced in other countries and cultures (Leong & Ponterotto, 2003; Pedersen & Leong, 1997). Most counseling interventions were designed for White, middle-class populations in Western countries. Practitioners who use these westernized 51 This study originatedas a master’s thesis by Meifen Wei at the University of Missouri–Columbia under the direction of P. Paul Heppner. This article reached final completionwhile at the Iowa State University. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 30th Annual Convention of the Asian American Psychological Association, Chicago, IL, August 2002. We thank Li-fei Wang, for her consultation and advice in collecting data; several Taiwanese counselors and cli- ents, for participating; David L. Vogel, Shu-Fen Shih, and Dong-gwi Lee, for their helpful com- ments on the draft of this article; and Douglas G. Bonett and Daniel W. Russell, for statistical consultation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Meifen Wei, Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, W112 Lagomarcino Hall, Ames, IA 50011- 3180. E-mail may be sent to wei@iastate.edu. THE COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGIST, Vol. 33 No. 1, January 2005 51-71 DOI: 10.1177/0011000004268636 © 2005 by the Society of Counseling Psychology.