The term minority refers here to groups within the population who differ from others in their cultural or ethnic characteristics and may be liable to different—often inferior—policy or procedure. Culture refers to the sum total of a group's ways of living, including the group's material culture, worldview, social organization, symbols, status, child-raising methods, language, technology, and citizenship. The term ethnicity, as used in multiethnic societies, applies to peoples from diverse cultural backgrounds who share a common national culture. Distinctive characteristics include identity with a national origin, religious practice, language besides English spoken in the home or neighborhood, dress, diet, nonnational holidays or ceremonial events, traditional family rituals, and use of disposable income and free time (Keyes 1976). Subculture refers to groups within a culture that have distinctive group characteristics but that cannot exist independently of the population at large. Substance use, abuse, or commerce can foster highly cohesive and distinctive subcultures, such as "bottle gangs," tavern culture, cocktail lounge culture, opium den culture, and crack house culture (Bourgois 1989; Dumont 1967; Weibel-Orlando 1985; Westermeyer 1974a). Cross-cultural can refer to the comparison of psychosocial characteristics across two or more cultural groups or, in the medical context, to treatment in which the clinician and the patient belong to different cultures (Comas-Diaz and Griffith 1988). Comparisons across cultures are often termed etic, whereas noncomparable, culture-specific elements or patterns are termed emic (Lefley and Pedersen 1986).