In Search of Cultural Diversity, Revisited: Recent Publication Trends in Cross-Cultural and Ethnic Minority Psychology

Abstract

Given the increasing proportion of ethnic minority individuals in the United States and psychology's historical reliance on theories derived from Euro American populations, it is important to monitor the status of cultural diversity research. We conducted a 10-year follow-up to Hall and Maramba's (2001) report of cross-cultural (CC) and ethnic minority (EM) publication trends. Comparing data from 1993-1999 and 2003-2009, we found that research on CC and EM issues continues to be underrepresented in the literature, particularly in top-tier journals. The American Psychological Association and Association for Psychological Science journals mirrored this discouraging trend, and the absence of top CC and EM authors on their editorial boards may point to a structural barrier to broader inclusion of cultural diversity research. We also found that fewer top CC and EM researchers are employed in psychology departments than one might hope, reflecting predominant attitudes within psychology of CC and EM research as peripheral to the larger field. Although clear that few gains have been made despite numerous awareness-raising efforts, the precise deficits were somewhat obscured, because the CC and EM terminology employed by Hall and Maramba (2001) did not fully capture the breadth of cultural diversity research currently underway in psychology. Thus, future attempts to assess the field would benefit from wider-reaching search terms. Additionally, we suggest that attention to reorganization within the evolving fields of cultural diversity research and to developing new categories of inquiry for research on cultural diversity that maintain focus on minority statuses in the United States may be productive routes forward for psychology as a discipline.

Invisibility of racial/ethnic minorities in developmental science: Implications for research and institutional practices.

“…In their review of articles published in APA and APS journals between 1993-1999, Nagayama Hall and Maramba (2001 found that only 6% of articles were focused on racial/ethnic minorities, and only 3% of articles in Developmental Psychology, arguably the leading APA journal focused on developmental science. Hartmann et al (2013) Quintana et al, 2006), it does not seem to have contributed to a major increase in the proportion of studies focusing on racial/ethnic minority youth. Importantly, the emphasis on invisibility should not be taken as an endorsement of racial/ethnic minority youth as passive, or as the seeds of a deficit-oriented research agenda.…”

Positive psychology in racial and ethnic groups: A second call to action!

“…Such an example probably represents just one of a great many psychological phenomena that are assumed in mainstream psychology to be universal in nature, until investigations of diverse populations reveal otherwise. thus, when one examines the predominant journals in psychology over the past several decades and finds that most of them continue to focus on studies of a very select group of privileged individuals of White or European descent (e.g., Hartmann et al, 2013;nagayama Hall & Maramba, 2001), it becomes not only a pressing scientific problem (e.g., low external validity) but also a challenging social problem (e.g., bias, invisibility, discrimination; Sue, 1999 According to Prilleltensky (1989), a central problem among social scientists is that they often portray themselves as impartial observers whose primary objective is to describe accurately the complex operations of human behavior and then disseminate such insights to the general public. Yet, what may be initially proffered as a purely descriptive finding often can easily turn into an unintended and culturally dangerous prescriptive act.…”

Potentially Harmful Therapy and Multicultural Counseling

“…However, a conservative burden-of-proof approach, according to a high standard of evidence, is not only inconsistent with the broad concern and anticipatory stance of the PHT literature (reflected in the qualifier “potentially”)—it could forestall timely attention to potential harm for ethnoracial minorities, irrespective of the extent to which it may be occurring. Given the likely low base rates of iatrogenic treatment, the discipline’s predominant focus on aggregate treatment outcomes, the marginalized status of research funding on socio-cultural rather than intra-individual factors (Nezu, 2005), and continued underrepresentation of ethnoracial minority concerns in the psychological literature (Hartmann et al, 2013), we anticipate that progress for such an empirical endeavor will be slow. This uphill climb is all the more reason for taking seriously, here and now, our call for a serious conversation between these divergent discourses.…”