Abstract
This Special Issue of Environment and Behavior (E&B) marks the completion of 50 years of publication for the journal; the first issue appeared in June 1969. As you will read in the overview of E&B’s publication history (“Celebrating Half a Century of Environment and Behavior: A Bibliometric Review”), the journal has grown from a publication with just two issues in its first year, to one that now publishes 10 issues per year and attracts a large number of submissions (more than 500 in 2017 and totaling 567 in 2018). The citation impact factor has also continued to rise, reaching 3.549 in 2017 (Journal Citations Report). Judged by these metrics, the journal has contributed to the literature on environment-behavior studies in a substantive way.
While there is substantial growth in the number of submissions, issues, and the impact factor, what has remained constant for E&B is the commitment to looking at environment-behavior issues from multiple perspectives. For example, E&B has been a home for those who write about extreme environments, and it is known for its inclusion of research using space syntax analysis. In the Editor’s Introduction and Preface to the first issue of E&B, Gary Winkel, the journal’s first editor, noted that the multidisciplinary feature of research on the environment was one of the journal’s assets.
E&B publishes papers from a myriad of disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, landscape architecture, urban planning, architecture, political science, and economics, among others. Not only is it a multidisciplinary journal, but it increasingly attracts submissions from an international audience. For example, in 2018, 76% of the submissions were from scholars outside North America.
The growth in submissions has been accompanied by increasing statistical sophistication in the work; across disciplines, approaches to design and analysis are changing. The journal is keeping abreast with changes in analytical approaches including hierarchical linear model(ing) (HLM) and path analysis; it is common to read papers presenting mediation and moderation analyses as well as less commonly used approaches in environment-behavior studies such as interrupted time series design.
When then EIC Ann Sloan Devlin and the senior associate editors sent out the call for papers in late 2017, they stated, For this special issue, we favor empirical submissions that are field studies, focusing on the physical environment (built and/or natural). Quantitative, mixed methods, and qualitative approaches are welcome, with an emphasis on contributions that are rigorous and make a compelling case for their contribution to the literature.
Like the approach to environment-behavior studies more generally, and reflecting the approach that has consistently characterized publications in E&B, the articles in this special issue could be described as a “smorgasbord,” meaning a wide variety or heterogeneous mix. The articles in the Special Issue reflect the breadth of topics that has been a consistent emphasis in the journal. Included are a field study using a mixed-methods approach to examine women’s sanitation utilization in Mathare Valley, Kenya; a study on the relationship between climate change and crime, focusing more specifically on seasonal variation and using large databases (the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]’s Uniform Crime Report [UCR] and the Global Historical Climatology Network); a social network analysis regarding the types of environmental behaviors influenced by opinion leaders in a religious congregation; an examination of the relationship between interior design and perceived residential crowding and chronic stress in children using a variety of measures—physiological, space syntax analysis, and self-report; and an analysis of the relationship of individual differences and building characteristics to wayfinding challenges in a unique multilevel building: The Seattle Central Public Library.
Recently an author wrote the journal seeking permission to reprint an image that had appeared in the very first issue of the journal, stating that the article in question was historically important in the topic area of the paper. We hope that the next 50 years of E&B will similarly produce publications that make important contributions to the study of the relationships between environment and behavior and are remembered well into the future.