Poster #88 - Representation of U.S. states in Psychological Research among Latinx Populations

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

The 21st century has seen an increase in the amount and variety of psychological research on Latinx, the largest minority group in the U.S., with great variability from the individual’s cultural origin (e.g. ethnicity) to region (e.g. nationality). We were interested in exploring how scientists recruit, conduct and report research on Latinx samples. Ethnicity and race are important components of individuals and should be addressed to capture the broader and deeper understanding in psychological research findings (Diemer, Mistry, Wadsworth, López, & Reimers, 2013). In order to explore Latinx/Hispanic work, the Journal of Latinx Psychology (JLP) and Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences (HJBS) were analyzed for 1) measures of ethnicity and race in empirical studies 2) nationalities represented 3) how researchers reported ethnic-racial demographics. The analysis included publications from 2013-2018 and revealed two common themes of reporting ethnicity and race: overrepresentation/underrepresentation and overgeneralization.
There is currently not a systematic way of reporting ethnicity and race among Latinx/Hispanic research, creating a vague sense of what and how ethnicity/race plays a role in the lives of participants. Second, studies used the Hispanic/Latinx terms interchangeably and is not consistent across publications. For the purpose of this project, we were only interested in publications with Latinx samples in the U.S. Therefore, studies outside of the U.S. and non-empirical studies were excluded. JLP went from N = 118 articles to N = 94 and HJBS went from N = 174 to N = 154. For this project, we developed a coding rubric for states that reflected the different ways researchers reported states and geographical regions and was compatible with the U.S. census. We used the states breakdown numbers or percentages, if provided. There were also studies that simply did not report the state, but instead reported geographical location (e.g. midwest). Our current results are reported in Table 1, which includes U.S. census data (2017) of the top 10 US states based on Hispanic population. Table 3 illustrates the difference of representation of studies from US states. We will further advance this project by exploring the different age groups and what we hypothesize about the lack of research on younger children in HJBS and JLP.
The authors discuss the importance of transparency from researchers in reporting the context of the sample, including country, state, neighborhood and demographic variables that are relevant to the goals of the project, except when there may be an issue of privacy and/or confidentiality involved. In addition, authors discuss the importance of recognizing the variability within the Latinx population and how it is reflected in the scientific discourse.

Authors

• Luis Mendez, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Abigail Hall, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga