Reporting participants’ race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sex in behavior-analytic research articles: Implications for implementing behavioral interventions in US schools

The current Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association indicates that the sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and disability status of research participants should be reported. The present study found that most (94.61%) of the manuscripts describing clinical interventions and published from 2013 through 2015 in five journals sympathetic to behavior analysis reported the sex of participants. Fewer such articles described participants’ disability status (68.86%), race/ethnicity (10.73%), or socioeconomic status (2.27%). Sex, disability status, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status were reported in 92.31, 64.04, 52.81, and 28.88% of the intervention articles published a special education journal sympathetic to behavior analysis from 2010 through 2015. Although there is general agreement that participant characteristics likely to influence responsiveness to the intervention being examined should be reported, there apparently is no agreement as to whether race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and disability status constitutes such characteristics. One purpose of this presentation is to encourage people who submit manuscripts to behavior-analytic journals, review those manuscripts, or read published articles, to consider which characteristics of participants merit reporting and the possible consequences of failing to consistently report those characteristics. The second purpose is to examine the implications of current reporting practices for implementing behavioral interventions in schools in the United States.