Parental incarceration in school psychology publications: A scoping review, content analysis, and comparison to related disciplines

Abstract

Parental incarceration touches the lives of millions of school-aged children and youth. School psychologists are positioned to support students who have experienced the incarceration of a loved one and to consult with school team members to boost students' long-term outcomes. This scoping review aimed to assess the scope and extent of parental incarceration's presence in the peer-reviewed and practitioner-oriented literature of school psychology, as well as to compare school psychology to the related disciplines of school counseling and special education. Twenty-three school psychology, school counseling, and special education peer-reviewed and practitioner-oriented publications were examined for articles that mentioned parental incarceration and were published between 2000 and 2023. A comprehensive strategy of database, manual, forward, and backward searches yielded 58 articles that met eligibility criteria. Of the three disciplines examined, school psychology proportionally had the second-most articles mentioning parental incarceration, trailing school counseling journals. School psychology only had one article with a sole focus on the topic of parental incarceration, with all other articles mentioning it as one of multiple concepts within the article or mentioning it only briefly. These findings highlight the necessity for targeted high-quality research in school psychology to focus on parental incarceration and to assess training and professional development needs within the field on this topic.