Purnell Model cultural assessment interview paper
Interview someone from a cultural background different from your own, complete the cultural assessment using the twelve domains of the Purnell Model, and write a five to six page APA paper on that culture's health practices, using initials only.
Editorial process
Last reviewed · August 13, 2026
Twelve domains, six pages
The arithmetic decides the paper. Twelve domains across five or six pages leaves roughly half a page each, and a paper that gives every domain equal weight reads as a questionnaire transcript. The Purnell Model is designed to be comprehensive at assessment and selective at reporting, so use all twelve in the interview and then let the paper be led by the domains where this person's account actually carried information. Overview and heritage, communication, family roles and organisation, workforce issues, biocultural ecology, high-risk behaviours, nutrition, pregnancy and childbearing, death rituals, spirituality, health-care practices and health-care practitioners are not equally salient for any one person, and the assessor is reading for whether you noticed which mattered. Cover all twelve domains so that nothing is missing from the assessment, but give the page space to the ones that actually did the work in the interview, and say briefly why the others were less informative for this person.
The second discipline is separating the person from the culture. An interview with one individual is an interview with one individual, and the most common failure in this assignment is generalising a single account into a description of a whole group: because your interviewee's family defers to an eldest son, the paper announces that the culture is patriarchal. Write what your interviewee said, attribute it to them, and use the transcultural literature to say whether it is representative, divergent, or unstudied. That habit also protects you on the confidentiality requirement, which is strict in this assignment: initials only, and never the name or any detail that would identify the person to a reader who knows them. Where the literature and the interview disagree, say so plainly, because that disagreement is the most interesting finding a paper like this can produce and it demonstrates exactly the judgement the model is meant to develop.
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Conduct a structured cultural assessment across the twelve Purnell domains.
- 02Select which domains merit extended discussion in a length-limited paper.
- 03Distinguish an individual's account from a generalisation about a cultural group.
- 04Compare interview findings with published transcultural literature.
- 05Maintain interviewee confidentiality in a written assessment.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
Course-wide instructions that accompany this question
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes. Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages. Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor. The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
Turn the brief into deliverables
- 01A person selected from a cultural group different from your own.
- 02A completed cultural assessment across all twelve Purnell domains.
- 03A five to six page scholarly paper on that culture's health practices, in APA format.
- 04Use of initials only, with the interviewee never named.
- 05A separate reference page citing all sources in APA format.
- 06Submission named in the required file-name format.
Interview, then the domains that earned their space
Selection and method
Who was interviewed, in initials, how the domains were covered, and in what setting.
Heritage and communication
Origins, migration, language, and the communication norms that shape a clinical encounter.
Family roles and spirituality
Decision making, gender and generational roles, and the place of belief in health.
Nutrition, biocultural ecology and risk
Diet, inherited risk, and behaviours the literature associates with the group.
Health-care practices and practitioners
Beliefs about illness, use of traditional practice, and attitudes to clinicians.
Interview against the literature
Where the account matches published findings and where it diverges.
The model, the literature, and the person
Recommended databases
- CINAHL
- PubMed
- Journal of Transcultural Nursing
- Office of Minority Health
- The Purnell Model textbook
Search sequence
- 1.Read the twelve domains and prepare questions for each before the interview.
- 2.Search the transcultural nursing literature for published work on this cultural group.
- 3.Find prevalence or biocultural data relevant to the biocultural ecology domain.
- 4.Look for evidence on this group's use of traditional or complementary practice.
- 5.Check APA requirements for citing a model from a textbook.
Reference shortlist
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.
- 01
Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services
Office of Minority Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services · 2024
The service standards that translate the assessment into practice obligations.
- 02
Cultural Religious Competence in Clinical Practice
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf · 2023
Spirituality, death rituals and health-care practice domains, with clinical implications.
- 03
Cultural Competence in the Care of Muslim Patients and Their Families
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf · 2023
A worked domain-by-domain account to compare your interview against, if applicable.
- 04
Cultural Competence in Caring for American Indians and Alaska Natives
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf · 2023
Heritage, biocultural ecology and practitioner-trust domains treated together for one group.
- 05
Social Determinants of Health
Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion · 2024
Keeps socio-economic findings from being misread as cultural ones.
Review before submission
Common mistakes
- Giving all twelve domains equal length, producing a transcript rather than a paper.
- Generalising one interviewee's account into a description of an entire culture.
- Naming the interviewee or including identifying detail.
- Choosing a colleague whose background is barely different, so the assessment finds nothing.
- Citing only the textbook, with no wider transcultural literature.
- Omitting domains that seemed irrelevant instead of covering them briefly.
Submission checklist
- All twelve domains are addressed at least briefly.
- The salient domains are given noticeably more space than the rest.
- Individual account and cultural claim are distinguishable throughout.
- Only initials are used, with no identifying details.
- Points of agreement and disagreement with the literature are noted.
- The paper is five to six pages in APA format with a separate reference page.
- The file is named in the format the prompt specifies.
Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read our academic-integrity policy.
Written by
Aaron Bishop
MA, Education
assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines
Aaron leads the EssayCrackers editorial desk. He works on how assignment briefs are read — what a rubric is actually asking for, and where students most often answer a different question than the one set.
Reviewed by
Dr. Nathan Cole
PhD, Rhetoric & Composition
Argumentation and thesis development
Nathan teaches first-year composition and directs a university writing center. He reviews EssayCrackers guides for argumentative soundness and citation accuracy.