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INTERSECTIONALITY AND SOCIAL EXPLANATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2014

Averil Y. Clarke  and
Leslie McCall
Averil Y. Clarke*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Suffolk University
Leslie McCall*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
*
Professor Averil Y. Clarke, Department of Sociology, Suffolk University, 8 Ashburton Place, Boston, MA 02108. Email: averil.clarke@suffolk.edu
Professor Leslie McCall, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208. Email: l-mccall@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

To the extent that intersectionality is becoming a common term in mainstream social science, it is as a methodological justification to separate out different racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other social groups for empirical analysis. One might call this the “intersectionality hypothesis,” and in its best incarnation, it is about getting the facts right and finding the differences that matter. But an intersectional analysis in the social sciences often involves more than this. An intersectional approach also leads to potentially different interpretations of the same facts, or what we term a different social explanation. It is not only the intersection of categories that defines an intersectional project, then, but the theoretical framing that informs the analysis and interpretation of the subject under study. This framing often leads to an analysis of multiple and even conflicting social dynamics that enable certain kinds of social understanding that are otherwise invisible when scholars focus on a single set of social dynamics. Because the social theoretical aspects of research on intersectionality are rarely discussed, relative to the more methodological and ontological aspects of intersectionality, this is our main subject matter in this article. We focus on the process of developing social explanations rooted in the intersection of multiple social dynamics in several examples from our own research and across a variety of topics in social science research.

Keywords

IntersectionalitySocial TheoryFamilyIncome InequalityLiberalism
Type
Intersectionality
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 2013 , pp. 349 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2013 

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