Sankofa: Using Topic Models to Review the History of the Journal of Black Psychology

Abstract

We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to review the articles published in JBP between 1975 and 2020. Doing so allowed us to estimate where JBP has been, and where it might go. We interpret our work within the framework of “Sankofa,” which is an Akan symbol for the integration of the past and present toward the future. Overall, we identified five major research themes that have characterized JBP over the past four decades: Racial Attitudes (i.e., how individuals think of themselves and others in the context of race and ethnicity), Health and Well-being (i.e., health disparities and community well-being), Education (i.e., learning and higher education experiences), Sexuality and Gender (i.e., how individuals think about gender, sexuality, and body image), and Resistance and Resilience (i.e., how people experience and cope with discrimination). The present research has implications for future research directions, including increasing the representation of Black communities outside the U.S. in the JBP literature, highlighting more holistic experiences of Black people of marginalized genders and sexualities, and generating and strengthening Black-centered constructs.