Twenty years of Adultspan Journal: what a meta-study shows about counseling adults

Journals tell a story about a field over time: who gets to write, what questions they ask, and which methods they trust. A meta-study reads that story on purpose.

This article, led by first author M. Rippeto and published in Adultspan Journal, reviews everything the journal published from 1999 to 2019. Adultspan focuses on counseling across adulthood, from emerging adults to older adults. I was part of the team that coded every article for author and article characteristics and compared three periods: 1999–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2019.

What changed over twenty years

Women made up about three quarters of lead authors across the twenty years. Use of advanced statistics such as MANOVA and factor analysis dropped, and reporting of reliability and validity held steady, with room to improve.

The near absence of practitioner voices in the literature is concerning.

From the article

What we recommend

• Invite more practicing counselors, not just faculty, to publish their work.
• Bring back intervention studies, since they are the designs that can show what helps clients.
• Report reliability and validity for every sample.
• Reach out to international authors to widen the journal’s view of adulthood.

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Reading a journal as a whole, rather than one article at a time, shows patterns no single study can. The shift toward qualitative work has given us rich accounts of adult experience. The drop in intervention research means we know less about what works. A healthy field needs both, and it needs counselors in practice to have a voice in the literature.