Reporting Demographic Variables in <i>JOBM</i> and <i>JAP</i>: A Comparison and Call to Action
OBM articles almost never report race, income, or language—publish these columns now.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors read every article published in two OBM journals during recent years.
They coded whether each paper told readers the participants' age, gender, race, income, and first language.
The goal was to see how often applied behavior analysts share basic facts about who they study.
What they found
Age and gender appeared about half the time in JOBM and most of the time in JAP.
Race, family income, and first language were almost never reported in either journal.
In short, the field knows little about who its data actually come from.
How this fits with other research
Jones et al. (2020) found the same blind spot in JABA. Together the two audits show the problem spans all flagship ABA journals.
Wallander et al. (1983) first warned that poor subject descriptions block replication; Nastasi et al. (2023) prove the warning still applies four decades later.
Conners et al. (2019) surveyed 575 certificants who said diversity training is weak; this audit gives them hard evidence that reporting gaps feed the problem.
Why it matters
Without race or income data we cannot spot service gaps or tell if an intervention helps everyone. Add a five-column table to your next paper: age, gender, race/ethnicity, SES, and language. It takes one extra page and moves the whole field toward equity.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Data on participant demographics (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status) can be used to evaluate the existence of disparities and other correlations between the impact of an intervention and people’s intersecting identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender) yet these data are seldom reported in behavior-analytic studies. To date, no review has been conducted evaluating the reporting of demographic variables within the subfield of organizational behavior management (OBM). OBM interventions often involve multiple participants across levels of an organization, posing unique considerations for reporting demographic variables and potentially identifiable information in accordance with an organization’s preference for disclosure and human resource policies. Interventions in industrial/organizational psychology may encounter similar barriers to reporting demographic variables. Therefore, we reviewed articles published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM) and the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) from 2015 to 2021 to evaluate current trends in the reporting of demographic variables. Studies that included participants and presented data (i.e., both applied and laboratory research; N = 205) were included for review and were coded based on the setting, method, and reported demographic variables. Results indicated that age and gender/sex were reported in about half of studies in JOBM and most studies in JAP, but race, socioeconomic status, and first language were rarely reported across journals. Considerations for reporting demographic variables in OBM and the utility of those data are discussed.
Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 2023 · doi:10.1080/01608061.2022.2082624