Subject selection in applied behavior analysis.
JABA authors still skip basic facts about who was in the study—fix it with one extra paragraph.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wallander et al. (1983) read every article in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis for one year.
They looked for how authors said they picked their participants.
The paper is a story-style review, not a meta-analysis.
What they found
Most studies did not say how they chose people.
Details like age, diagnosis, or how they got into the study were missing.
Without these facts, other teams cannot copy the study.
How this fits with other research
Jones et al. (2020) did the same kind of audit 37 years later. They found JABA articles still leave out basic facts like race and income.
Essig et al. (2023) counted procedural-fidelity reports and saw the same gap: half of recent studies skip them.
These later papers do not contradict Wallander et al. (1983); they show the same skip-the-details habit moved to new spots.
Fahmie et al. (2023) gives a fix: a short ecological-validity checklist you can tack onto any paper.
Why it matters
If you write or read a JABA study, add a tiny “Participants” paragraph. Say where they came from, how you picked them, and key traits. It takes five minutes and lets the next BCBA replicate your work.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Past researchers have commented on the role of specifying relevant subject characteristics in determining the generality of experimental findings. Knowledge of subject selection criteria is important in interpreting and replicating research results. Such knowledge, as compared with many other historical and demographic characteristics of the subject, is likely to be related to a procedure's effectiveness. Data indicated that the majority of articles published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis do not provide an adequate description of subject selection criteria. The failure to provide detailed information concerning subject selection criteria can prevent systematic replication of research results. The relatively low cost inclusion of complete descriptions of subject selection criteria would enhance the generality of applied behavior analysis research by facilitating systematic inductive manipulations and replications.
The Behavior analyst, 1983 · doi:10.1007/BF03391872