AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY NARROWNESS 1
Exploring 95% of Narrowness in American Psychology
Arnett’s article is based on the hypothesis that most of the published APA works are based on research on Americans, which are 5 percent of the world’s population. Arnett purports that these published journals are narrow in the sense that results of psychological research omit 95 percent of humanity. Psychological research being the study of human behavior is only complete when it is extensive and broad enough to represent humanity as a whole not a specific group of people. People in the world have varied ethnicities, cultural practices and economic activities and therefore the need to put all these factors to consideration (Miller, 2006). Lastly, the article suggests possible ways of broadening the scope of study during psychological research.
b. According to Arnett (2008), explain the issue surrounding the entire field of psychological research.
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APA text books and journals focus on the researching cognitive and emotional functioning of humans residing in the U.S. and assuming the results of the researches apply all humans. Legitimate research studies should rather base their study to not only one but diverse groups of the general population (Heine & Norenzayan, 2006). Conducting research that includes all the groups of human population would yield more satisfying result that represent the whole population.
Methodology and Results
How was the data collected in this article?
Data for this article was collected by roughly sampling a number of article. These articles would then be subjected to analysis to determine whether each journal focused on Americans alone or the whole world. The data collected focused on articles analyzed for five years that s from 2003 to 2007. For each article, national location and the nationality of the authors were recorded.
b. How many journals were included in this study?
To investigate the purpose statement of this paper, Arnett sampled six APA journals. This includes, Journal of Education Psychology (JEP), Health Psychology (HP), Journal of Family Psychology (JFP), Journal of Abnormal Psychology (JAP), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), and Lastly the Developmental Psychology (DP). These journals were all chosen as representation of psychology in diverse areas. The overall journal assessment covered 4,037 articles in the last twenty years.
What percentage of first authors were affiliated with the US between these journals? Note: Please refer to the APA manual on how to format percentages.
Between the all the journals samples, it was found that 73 percent of the journals researched and published at U.S. universities. 85 percent JFP journal and 65 percent of JPSP journal had its first authors being citizens of U.S.A. Of all the journals used in this research 68 percent were authored and research in the U.S.
What is the number of authors affiliated with the US between these six journals?
5 out of 6 authors of the six journals were Americans. The analysis also found that all of the 9 editors and the editorial boards for the six journal were predominantly Americans. This implies that 82 percent of the editorial teams for the journals were affiliated with the U.S.
What was the percentage of American participants from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology?
Sample sizes indicated that 83 percent of participants for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology were Americans. This implies the U.S predominates not only the authors and editors of the journals but also the participants of research studies. This level of skew is narrow and therefore likely to give misleading report about the rest of humanity.
Which researcher indicated that American psychological researchers could, theoretically, study various cultures by using Americans as the prominent sample size, but the samples studied largely remain European American? Which research journal was this study published in?
Samples of articles in the U.S. were found to predominantly focus on European Americans. About 77 percent of the journals in American had samples mainly comprising of middle class European American ethnicity group (Graham, 1992). Developmental Psychology Journal of Personality had a majority 82% of articles focused on Americans of European descent. The author published in the Journal of Education Psychology.
Discussion
This study proves with sufficient evidence that there exists a profound level of in the content of APA journals in terms of diversity. This therefore posits how American psychological research is skewed and should not be used a representation of the whole world. There is low representation of diversity in psychological literature (Bauserman, 1997). The national affiliation among the authors and editorial teams shows dominance of the Americans. For this reason, APA journals should include more non-American editors and authors. APA should also mentor non-American researchers who want to publish their work. APA should also fund research works from scientists from all over the world to encourage diversity.
Reasons why most APA journals are concentrated on America and Western nations
Most APA journals happen to concentrated in Americans and western cultures. The narrowness of APA journals is studying the psychology in humanity is attributed to dominance of research resources in the U.S and secondly is the availability of research resources in wealthier countries. United States of American receive immigrants from nations all over the world (Arnett, 2008). This means that the U.S culture is diversified since it has citizens from different ethnicities. Since most of the citizens are of diverse cultures they are assumed to be a representation of the whole humanity. Adequate funding of research by government of wealthier nations is also another reason why U.S.A and Western nations publish more journals in Psychology.
References
Arnett, J.J. (2008) The neglected 95%: why American psychology needs to become less
American. American Psychologist 63(7), 602.
Bauserman, R. (1997). International representation in the psychological literature. International
Journal of Psychology, 32, 107-112
Graham, S. (1992). " Most of the subjects were White and middle class": Trends in published
research on African Americans in selected APA journals, 1970–1989. American Psychologist , 47 (5), 629.
Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2006). Toward a psychological science for a cultural species.
Perspectives on Psychological Science , 1 (3), 251-269.
Miller, J. G. (2006). Insights into moral development from cultural psychology. Handbook of
moral development , 375-398.
