What If Psychology Took Intersectionality Seriously? Changing How Psychologists Think About Participants

By Kaitlin McCormick-Huhn, Leah R. Warner, Isis H. Settles, S. Shields. Psychology of women quarterly, 2019

91 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using intersectionality to change how psychologists think about the demographic profile of their participants is one readily available change that psychologists across the discipline can implement to improve psychological science. In this article, we aim to provide a guide for psychologists who are not already engaged with feminist practices and/or are unsure of how an intersectional approach to participants applies to their research. We argue that by engaging with four perspective shifts of intersectional thinking: multidimensionality, dynamic construction, structural power, and outcomes of systemic disadvantage and advantage, psychologists can more accurately represent the “person” that psychology, as a discipline, seeks to understand. We suggest changes at the researcher, journal, and grant-making agency levels to support an intersectional reconceptualization of participants. As psychology continues to change, in order to foster reproducible science practices and research with relevance to real-world problems, there is opportunity to promote discipline-level change that would take intersectionality seriously.

Subfields: General Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc410950b1d12b5c7bf4cb8cb861b3e9bbbb0cb9

Citations in the corpus

• Understanding psychology's resistance to intersectionality theory using a framework of epistemic exclusion and invisibility (2020, unknown): “In psychology, dominant approaches emphasize generalizable, universal, quantitative, and parsimonious studies of basic (vs. applied) processes with little consideration of contextual factors (Magnusson & Marecek, 2017; McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019).”