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We invited 39 community members to participate in Cultural/ Gender Sensitivity Focus Groups. These persons were identified by contacting local and state agencies that promote the interests of mi nonty and wornen "s group s t Nineteen persons agreed to p articip ate in one of the Focus Group sessions. The participants, listed in Appendix 0, represented a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, and include both mere and women. One Firefighter* the President of the local branch of the African American Firefighter's Association, participated in a community Focus pup session. For the Firefighter Focus Group sessions, we invited persons currently in the entry -level Fashion who went through an oral screening interview before they were hired by the MFD. This includes all Firefighters -hired since 1986. Among this group, we used a stratified random sam- pling procedure to select Firefighters from various minority groups, as well as female Firefight- ers. Table 12 shows the characteristics of the Firefighter Focus Group participants, At the beginning of each Focus Group session we spent some dme explaining how the structured interview process works. - we then focused on subtle ways in which culture and/or g ender can have an impact on the interview, e.g., in the way questions are warded or in the behavior of the interviewers. Te- we showed participants a list of charkteristics which UM personnel rated as important � 63r effective performance in the entry -level job. we asked participants to tell us how questions Witten to measure those characteristics or rating scales used to evaluate candidate responses might be influenced by cultural and gender issues. we also asked participants for suggestions about how to train interviewers to be sensitive to cultural and gender issues during the interview. Summary of the Focus Group Discussions. Focus Group participants made several suggestions about how cultural and gender issues may impact the inwMewr. - These suggestions ma y be divided into comments related to the process of the interview, comments related to �rid