Thirty-two years of history: Analysis of five school psychology journals from 1964 to 1995 for content trends and author gender, affiliation, and frequency of publications

This research was a systematic study of the evolution of the field of school psychology over a 32-year period by review of literature in five school psychology journals. The primary objective of this study was to trace the evolution of the field by investigating authorship and content in five school psychology journals, then to provide information relative to the status of the field that would enable professionals to make predictions about the evolving future of school psychology.;The researcher chose to investigate Journal of School Psychology, Psychology in the Schools, School Psychology International, School Psychology Quarterly, and School Psychology Review. Five thousand and twelve authors and 4,918 journal articles were analyzed in terms of number of authors per article, gender of authors, affiliation of authors, frequency of publications per author, and content of articles. Content was recorded in one of 11 predetermined categories that the researcher felt adequately covered the range of topics included in the volumes of literature covering the 32-year span. The research design was ex post facto. Frequencies, percentages, and chi-square analysis were determined using the SPSS Statistical Data Analysis (1990) system to statistically describe the results.;Gender, affiliation, and content were found to provide a significant amount of variation across journals when reporting collective results. When data were analyzed by time period there was little dissimilarity when compared to the comprehensive time period. Results demonstrated the following trends. Significantly more males published articles in the five journals. Of the male and female authors who published, a high percentage was affiliated with higher education. Content patterns remained consistent with articles addressing assessment issues accounting for the highest percentage of content literature collectively and in each of the four time periods.