Methods of intersectional research

Abstract

Intersectionality is a powerful concept within sociology, urging scholars to consider how an array of socially constructed dimensions of difference intersect to shape each person’s experiences and actions. This paper provides a number of different blueprints for designing intersectional research, which can be adapted for different purposes. The key methodological tenets of intersectional research are oppression, relationality, complexity, context, comparison, and deconstruction. This paper defines these tenets, addresses misunderstandings of their implications, and applies these tenets to existing intersectional research. Multiple qualitative, comparative, and quantitative strategies can be used to carry out intersectional research; there is not just one way to do intersectional empirical research. While intersectional methods require thought in designing the research, they are doable. What is more, they provide much more nuanced understandings of social relations and inequality. If race, class, gender and other socially constructed dimensions of difference are understood not as static but as dynamic, researchers can employ a wide variety of methodological tools to analyze power relations via their intersections.

Acknowledgment

We are grateful for the many excellent comments, inspiration, and support we have received on this work, including from Sharla Alegria, Enobong Branch, Abigail Bogg, Irene Boeckmann, Maxine Craig, Ivy Ken, Yang-Sook Kim, Nicole Gonzalez Van-Cleve, Miliann Kang, Dwanna McKay, Cassaundra Rodriguez, Mary Romero, Mahala Dyer Stewart, Eiko Strader, and Kyla Walters.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joya Misra

Joya Misra is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She is an intersectional researcher who focuses on politics and labor, and a methodologist who uses a wide range of quantitative, comparative, and qualitative methods. Her works have been published in a variety of journals, including American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, Social Forces, and Social Problems.

Celeste Vaughan Curington

Celeste Vaughan Curington is Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. She is an intersectional researcher whose several lines of sociological inquiry examine race, class and gender through the lens of care labor and migration, family, and interracial/intra-racial intimacy, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. She has forthcoming and published works in a variety of academic outlets, including the American Sociological Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Contexts, and Symbolic Interaction. She has a forthcoming coauthored book, The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, with University of California Press.

Venus Mary Green

Venus Mary Green is a doctoral student in the Sociology department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is an intersectional researcher who examines Black women's labor and is a theorist in the areas of Afro-Pessimism, Black Feminism, and the sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois. She has presented her work at the Eastern Sociological Society, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the American Sociological Association.