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.