Identifying Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Topics in Human Resource Development

Abstract: Considerable attention has been paid to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) since many scholars have discussed the significance of DEI on organizational improvement, employee experience, and workplace behaviors (Ashikali et al., 2020; Mor Barak, 2015). In management, DEI research has grown substantially and expanded to include various subtopics over the last 30 years (Holmes et al., 2021; Köllen, 2021; Post et al., 2021). For instance, the interactions among DEI components, DEI contexts, technological effects, and diversity management practices can be critical agenda for future DEI research (Köllen, 2021; Post et al., 2021).
In human resource development (HRD), scholars have also discussed DEI topics, including gender, race, age, organizational climate, and sexual identity (Bohonos & James-Gallaway, 2022; Bierema, 2020: Collins, 2012; Park et al., 2022; Thijssen et al., 2014). Although studies have reported the importance of DEI components in organizations, most studies have primarily focused more on specific dimensions as described above. Few studies have comprehensively reviewed DEI research trends and topics in HRD. Although a small number of scholars have reviewed diversity and inclusion research to identify DEI research types (e.g., Sparkman, 2019), the discussion has not included specific cases on overall topics in DEI research from HRD perspectives. Thus, more research is needed to examine which DEI topics are pursued in HRD and how this information plays, and which areas are in popularity and how these DEI studies relate to one another (Griffith & Steyvers, 2004). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify DEI research topics in HRD through a topic modeling approach. The research question guiding this study is: What DEI-related research topics have been published in the HRD field?
To answer this research question, the four major journals in the HRD field—Human Resource Development Quarterly(HRDQ), Human Resource Development Review(HRDR), Human Resource Development International(HRDI), and Advances in Developing Human Resources(ADHR)—were selected. Using Scopus database, the total 2,694 articles were downloaded and reviewed to identify information of each article on title, authors, publication year, abstract, doi, keywords, and others (Table 1). Each author independently reviewed the titles and abstracts of the articles and identified DEI-related articles. After the authors conducted a cross-check of their lists and discussed the discrepancies to reach a consensus, the final 329 abstracts (totaling 49,936 words) were identified. A topic modeling, a technique within text mining, was adopted to analyze the abstracts and texts and to uncover hidden information or patterns from text data. Topic modeling is capable of identifying and extracting latent themes within a collection of texts (Blei, 2012). Specifically, we employed Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) which is the most widely used topic modeling to reveal major research themes. Data were loaded into R and various packages (e.g., tidyverse, tidytext, tm, topicmodels, dplyr ) were used to process and analyze the data. In the data cleaning stage, we followed the mandatory and recommended data cleaning and preparation steps suggested by Schmiedel et al. (2019). For instance, we removed all the duplicate documents and then split them into words (tokenization). Then we removed stop words (e.g., the, and, but, of) and normalized all the letters. General words (e.g., study, paper, results, suggest, discuss) frequently appear in most abstract were also removed. Then we used Griffiths and Steyvers’ (2004) FindTopicsNumber method which calculate various metrics to estimate the optimal number of topics for the LDA model. Despite utilizing this approach, the most appropriate number of topics remained unclear. Therefore, we also conducted a qualitative approach to identify the number of topics by evaluating the interpretability of the models. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, we concluded that there are eight topics, and the results of this analysis are presented in Table 2.
We labeled each topic as workplace relationships (Topic 1), impact of identity (Topic 2), discrimination and equal opportunity (Topic 3), global workforce diversity (Topic 4), minority and their career challenges (Topic 5), power imbalance (Topic 6), training in DEI (Topic 7), and women in leadership role (Topic 8). More information will be provided in the poster presentation.