Date of Graduation

Spring 2021

Degree

Master of Science in Applied Behavior Analysis

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Jordan Belisle

Abstract

Antiracism movements in the United States have gained momentum over the last year as events of racial discrimination have been publicly displayed in the media and increased social awareness regarding barriers and disadvantages facing certain communities in a broader cultural ecosystem. The current review evaluated the prevalence of racism and anti-racism research within 8 major behavior analytic journals, where 39 articles met the inclusion criterion. Each article was evaluated on based on critical race theory, as relating to implicit bias, white privilege, or systemic racism extended from the nested model developed by Belisle, Payne, and Paliliunas (in press) and its theory-to-impact model developed by Dixon, Belisle, Rehfeldt, and Root (2019). Results show that research on racism and anti-racism is increasing at a exponentiating rate in behavior analytic journals – although this work appears to be constrained largely to only a few journals in the field of applied behavior analysis. Results also show that a majority of the literature is theoretical or correlations, with limited direct experimental research and even fewer studies that have demonstrated a reduction is racist behavior. I discuss some potential avenues for future research based on these findings.

Keywords

racial discrimination, implicit bias, white privilege, systemic racism, critical race theory, theory-to-impact

Subject Categories

Social Justice

Copyright

© Lindsey Audrey Marie Dennis

Download

Open Access

Share

COinS