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Call for Papers: Advancing Quantitative Approaches to Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Counseling

Submission deadline: 14 August 2026

Guest Editor: Dr. Janeé Steele, Walden University (email: janee.steele@mail.waldenu.edu)

The Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development (JMCD), the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD), a division of the �ֲ���ý, invites manuscript submissions for a special issue focused on the innovative use of quantitative methodologies in research on race, ethnicity, and culture, with a primary emphasis on race and ethnicity as key parts of the research questions, design, and analysis.

Rationale for the Special Issue

Quantitative research plays an essential role in advancing understanding of race, ethnicity, and culture by allowing scholars to examine patterns, mechanisms, disparities, and outcomes across individuals, groups, and systems (Balkin & Kleist, 2023; Kalkbrenner, 2022). When designed with cultural intentionality, quantitative approaches can illuminate how racialized experiences, structural inequities, and sociopolitical contexts shape mental health and human development (Cokley & Awad, 2013; Quintana et al., 2001; Suzuki et al., 2021; Weller, 2025).

Despite this potential, quantitative research on race and ethnicity has often struggled to reflect lived realities, including how people experience and make meaning of their racial and ethnic identities and how researchers define, identify, and categorize the populations being studied. For example, scholars have long noted that race is frequently treated as a demographic category or proxy variable rather than distinguished from related psychological constructs such as racial identity attitudes, acculturation, or experiences of racism, leading to interpretations that obscure cultural meaning and context (Quintana et al., 2001). Conventional quantitative designs have also relied heavily on decontextualized group comparisons that fail to account for the salience, centrality, or lived significance of race and ethnicity for individuals, thereby limiting the ability to examine how racism and structural conditions shape outcomes (Cokley & Awad, 2013; Fischer & Moradi, 2001). As a result, important questions about race and ethnicity may be simplified, overlooked, or framed in ways that reinforce deficit-oriented interpretations.

This special issue seeks to advance the field by showcasing rigorous, innovative, and culturally grounded quantitative methodologies that meaningfully engage race, ethnicity, and culture rather than treating them as peripheral or purely demographic variables. We are particularly interested in applied examples that demonstrate how quantitative approaches can be used to generate culturally meaningful knowledge, inform counseling practice and training, and contribute to equity-oriented policy and systems-level change.

Scope of the Special Issue

JMCD welcomes manuscripts, from all disciplines that focus on counseling, that employ quantitative designs to examine race, ethnicity, and culture in counseling and human development. Submissions should move beyond describing statistical techniques and instead clearly articulate how methodological choices align with culturally responsive research aims and theoretical frameworks.

We are not seeking simple literature reviews of quantitative methods or generic overviews of analytic techniques. Manuscripts should emphasize application, innovation, and critical engagement with quantitative methodology in the context of racial and ethnic research.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Measurement challenges related to within-group heterogeneity

• Quantitative approaches to measuring racial and ethnic identity, centrality, and salience

• Cultural validity and interpretation of scores across racial and ethnic groups

• Modeling the effects of racism, discrimination, and structural inequities

• Quantitative studies that meaningfully inform culturally responsive counseling practice and training

• Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit)

• Addressing race and ethnicity in grants, or program evaluation

• How dissertation chairs can provide guidance on doctoral students can address race and ethnicity in Counseling

Authors should follow JMCD s and submit manuscripts through the , clearly indicating that their submission is for this special issue. Each manuscript will undergo a blind review process.

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Janeé Steele
Associate Editor, JMCD Walden University United States

Submission Guidelines/Instructions

Please refer to the to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question: "Is this submission for a special issue?" by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.

The timeline for publication is as follows:

• August 14, 2026: Full-length manuscript due
• October 1, 2026: Feedback and manuscript status provided to authors by JMCD Editorial Board (traditional blind review) and guest editor
• November 6, 2026: Final submission due
• January 2027: Articles published in the JMCD

For additional information or questions, please contact the special issue editor or the Editor-in-Chief of JMCD Dr. Carla Adkison-Johnson (Email: cadkison-johnson@uky.edu).

References

Balkin, R. S., & Kleist, D. M. (2023). Introduction to research in counseling. American Counseling Association.

Cokley, K., & Awad, G. H. (2013). In defense of quantitative methods: Using the “master’s tools” to promote social justice. Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, 5(2), 26–41.

Fischer, A. R., & Moradi, B. (2001). Racial and ethnic identity: Recent developments and needed directions. In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C. M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (2nd ed., pp. 341–370). Sage Publications.

Kalkbrenner, M. T. (2022). Guidelines and recommendations for writing a rigorous quantitative methods section in counseling and related fields. The Professional Counselor, 12(3), 217–231.

Quintana, S. M., Troyano, N., & Taylor, G. (2001). Cultural validity and inherent challenges in quantitative methods for multicultural research. In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C. M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of multicultural counseling (2nd ed., pp. 604–630). Sage Publications.

Suzuki, S., Morris, S. L., & Johnson, S. K. (2021). Using QuantCrit to advance an anti-racist developmental science: Applications to mixture modeling. Journal of Adolescent Research, 36(5), 535–560.

Weller, B. E. (2025). Latent class analysis: A statistical approach for advancing research on race and culture. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. Advance online publication.