Methodological Rigor in Journal of Counseling & Development Qualitative Research Articles: A 15-Year Review

Qualitative research has expanded in the counseling profession, with greater attention to publishing qualitative research (see Choudhuri, Glauser, & Peregoy, 2004; Hunt, 2011; Kline, 2008; Kline & Farrell, 2005) and acknowledgment that it requires skills deemed congruent with the counseling profession (e.g., reflexivity, social advocacy, interviewing; Hays & Singh, 2012; Morrow, 2005; Singh & Shelton, 2011). Furthermore, the number of qualitative research articles is increasing: Best estimates from content analyses and metastudies conducted in the past decade indicate that the proportion of these articles relative to all published articles rose from 2.0% to 5.0% in the 1980s and 1990s (Berrios & Lucca, 2006) to 5.0% to 16.5% currently (Arredondo, Rosen, Rice, Perez, & Tovar-Gamero, 2005; Berrios & Lucca, 2006; Byrd, Crockett, & Erford, 2012a, 2012b; Woo & Heo, 2013). When examining the percentage of qualitative research articles from the number of empirical articles, we found that only 6.5% of articles represented qualitative research in the mid-1990s (Crockett, Byrd, & Erford, 2012) as compared with 38.0% currently (Byrd et al., 2012a; Crockett et al., 2012; Crockett, Byrd, Erford, & Hays, 2010; Erford, Crockett, Giguere, & Darrow, 2011; Wester, Borders, Boul, & Horton, 2013). This shift toward increased attention to qualitative methodology in counseling publications creates new questions, particularly related to the quality of published qualitative research. Content analyses can provide the profession with basic descriptive information of articles while showing publishing trends. In the past few decades, several counseling content analyses examining Journal of Counseling & Development (JCD) content exclusively (i.e., Arredondo et al., 2005; Blancher, Buboltz, & Soper, 2010; Nilsson, Love, Taylor, & Slusher, 2007; Pelsma & Cesari, 1989; Weinrach, Lustig, Chan, & Thomas, 1998; Williams & Buboltz, 1999) or including JCD in a brief list of other counseling and counseling-related journals (i.e., Berrios & Lucca, 2006; Evans, 2013; Singh & Shelton, 2011; Woo & Heo, 2013) have become available. There have also been pattern reviews in other American Counseling Association (ACA) divisionjoumals in which JCD was not included (see Byrd et al., 2012a, 2012b; Crockett et al., 2010, 2012; Erford et al., 2011). Although these reviews provide information about research topics and content areas, author characteristics (e.g., rank, gender, institutional affiliation, geographic region), research approach (e.g., research paradigm and tradition), and sample information (cultural composition of sample, sample size, sampling method), there is a minimal emphasis on evaluating the quality of information presented in terms of informing the profession. More specifically, although three studies (i.e., Berrios & Lucca, 2006; Singh & Shelton, 2011; Woo & Heo, 2013) focused on the content of qualitative research, none of these focused solely on JCD content and only two investigated quality indicators. For example, Singh and Shelton (2011), in their qualitative content analysis of 12 qualitative articles addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender population topics in counseling, investigated the presence of researcher reflexivity (58.3% of articles), which is a strategy for trustworthiness. In addition, Woo and Heo (2013) reported common strategies of trustworthiness for 81 qualitative articles across three ACA journals, identifying strategies of researcher reflexivity (48.0%), member checking (39.5%), external auditors (27.2%), data triangulation (21.0%), use of audit trails (17.3%) and reflexive journals (14.8%), prolonged engagement (13.6%), and constant comparison (12.3%). Moreover, Wester et al. (2013) offered the only content analysis on the quality of quantitative (n = 38) and mixed-methods (n = 2) published articles in JCD. Clearly, there lacks in-depth study of the quality of research in general, and qualitative research more specifically. …