In the context of the scientific investigation of social challenges, and drawing on the example of refugees and migration, we investigated to what extent psychological research takes up current social and political issues, whether it provides an evidence-based foundation for addressing social challenges, and to which subdisciplines of psychology the research topics can be assigned. Specifically, the abstracts of 4,073 publications from German-speaking countries, documented in the psychological reference database PSYNDEX and published between 1980 and 2017, were analyzed using structural topic modeling. A total of 19 topics were identified. The most strongly increasing trend was shown for topics concerning the traumatization of refugees, transcultural psychotherapy, and rehabilitative treatment. Topics concerning the situation of foreigners and guest workers, juvenile crime, as well as social integration and acculturation in relation to the former German Democratic Republic showed decreasing trends. The topic of language development of migrant children had the highest probability of being addressed by empirical studies; the topic of identity development was most probable for nonempirical contributions. In summary, important social and political developments in the field of refugees and migration are reflected in psychological literature. A mixed picture emerges with regard to empirical contributions on the topics. Most topics have a clinical-psychological focus, but other disciplines are also represented. From a methodological perspective, the topic modeling approach has proved to be a helpful method for scientometric investigations within large text corpora. © 2019 Hogrefe Verlag.

Migration Refugees Trends topic modeling scientometrics

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