Social justice is one of the core professional values in the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics. A value that central should show up in what our journals publish. Does it?
That was the question behind this study, led by Dr. Colette T. Dollarhide and published in the Journal of Counseling & Development. I was one of twelve co-authors on a team that read and coded the titles and abstracts of counseling journal articles to see how often they addressed social justice.
917
articles analyzed
19
journals: 18 from ACA and one from ASCA
2
years compared: 2018 and 2022
Why those two years
In 2020 ACA released its Anti-Racism Statement. We chose 2018, two years before the statement, and 2022, two years after it. Comparing the same journals across those two years let us ask whether a public commitment from the profession’s largest association was followed by a change in what its journals put into print.
How we did it
We used qualitative content analysis, a method for coding text systematically against agreed categories. For every article, we decided whether the title and abstract addressed social justice content, then calculated a publication rate for each journal in each year. We also recorded which social justice topics appeared.
Journal by journal
The article reports results for each journal separately, so editors and readers can see where their own journal stands.
Topics, not just counts
We listed the social justice topics that appeared, which shows where the conversation is active and where it is quiet.
Who can act
We wrote implications for researchers, association leaders, editors, and reviewers, since each plays a part in what gets published.
A professional value should be visible in the profession’s scholarship.
Why this matters to me
My own research is about students who are harmed in ways that school systems are slow to name, especially online. This project is a reminder of how much a field’s priorities live in its publication record. What journals print shapes what gets taught in counselor education, what gets cited, and what new counselors come to think of as central to the work.
Coding 917 abstracts as a large team also meant agreeing on definitions: what counts as social justice content, and what is only adjacent to it. That kind of careful, shared judgment is what makes a content analysis trustworthy.
If you edit, review for, or write for a counseling journal, I hope you’ll look at your own journal’s numbers in the article and think about what the next two years could look like.
The article
Dollarhide, C. T., Middleton, T., Burciaga, L., Casani, J., Dockery, N., Fraley, A. M., Karkhanis, S., Levine, A., Lynn, M., Mushunje, R., Osei Twerefour, I. H., & Shrewsbury-Braxton, S. (2024). Social justice content in counseling journals: Comparison of publication rates. Journal of Counseling & Development, 102(3), 350–360.
