South African Journal of Psychology 43(2) 222 –237 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0081246313482630 sap.sagepub.com Reflecting on South African Psychology: Published research, ‘relevance’,

As South Africa prepared to host the 30th International Congress of Psychology in 2012, a call was made to reflect on the strengths of and challenges facing contemporary South African Psychology. This article presents our response to our brief to focus on social issues by presenting the results of a situational analysis of South African Psychology over the last 5 years and comparing this corpus of data to a similar analysis reported in Macleod. Articles appearing in the South African Journal of Psychology and abstracts in PsycINFO with the keyword ‘South Africa ’ over a 5.5-year period were analysed. The content of 243 South African Journal of Psychology articles and 1986 PsycINFO abstracts was analysed using the codes developed by Macleod. Results indicate that an increase in the number of articles, a reduction in the percentage of articles using quantitative methodologies and ‘hard ’ science theoretical frameworks (particularly in the South African Journal of Psychology), and an increase in qualitative, theoretical, and methodological articles, and articles using systems-oriented theory (particularly in the South African Journal of Psychology). Traditional topics of assessment, stress and psychopathology continue to dominate, with social issues, such as housing, land reform, development programmes, water resources and socio-economic inequities being largely ignored