Multiculturalism and Social Justice Themes in Group Counseling Research: A Latent Dirichlet Allocation Analysis of Published Abstracts

The importance of multicultural competence for effective group therapy practice has been widely acknowledged. Gaining an understanding of trends in the canon of group therapy scholarship and identifying gaps has implications for future research and practice. As such, the present study examined trends in the scholarly literature on multiculturalism (e.g., culture, ethnicity, identity) and social justice (e.g., redressing inequities, systemic oppression, and privilege) in group psychotherapy. Method: We conducted a PsycINFO search for peer-reviewed, scholarly journal articles with keywords related to group counseling and multiculturalism and social justice. We analyzed the abstracts of the resulting 277 English-language articles published from 1947-2020 using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a topic modeling approach. We present themes and discuss implications for future scholarship, as well as study limitations.