Characteristics of Qualitative Research in Behavior-Analytic Journals: A Scoping Literature Review

Martin Loya et al. (2026) hunted for every qualitative paper printed in behavior-analytic journals. They found 38 articles that used interviews, focus groups, or open-ended surveys. Most talked to caregivers or teachers and then looked for repeating themes.

The team recorded who was studied, how data were gathered, and where the work appeared. Every paper had to live in a journal that calls itself behavior-analytic.

Only a trickle of qualitative work makes it into our journals. When it does, it is almost always caregiver or staff interviews coded by hand and printed in Behavior Analysis in Practice.

No other journal came close. The 38 papers span many years, showing the field still leans hard on numbers.

Kemmerer et al. (2023) and O'Neill et al. (2025) both scoured caregiver-training reviews. Martin Loya et al. (2026) scooped those same reviews into their bigger net. Together they show we ask caregivers plenty, but we rarely let them speak in their own words.

Curiel et al. (2023) looked at college-classroom studies and also found thin use of open-ended data. The pattern is the same: we measure learning with graphs, not student voices.

Khokhar et al. (2025) took the opposite road. They counted numbers-only trials on adult problem behavior and still found weak rigor. Their review and the present one agree: whether we use stories or statistics, our methods need tightening.

If you write or review for a behavior-analytic journal, think beyond bar graphs. Caregivers and teachers hold rich information that scatterplots can miss. Add one open-ended question to your next social-validity form. You might spot why the intervention flopped even when the data look fine.