Published in:
01-07-2017 | Commentary
Explaining intersectionality through description, counterfactual thinking, and mediation analysis
Author:
John W. Jackson
Published in:
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology
|
Issue 7/2017
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Excerpt
I would like to thank Schwartz [
1] for insightful questions about our paper [
2] on whether and how quantitative approaches could be useful for understanding intersectionality, and I would also like to thank the Editor for providing an opportunity to respond. On many points, we agree. The additive joint disparity we considered is a policy-relevant measure that can be used to track the health of multiply marginalized populations, without any reference to interactions, and certainly this focus is consistent with intersectionality. Schwartz’s emphasis that, when available, social theory should guide an analysis is an excellent one and is why we provided an extensive, though not exhaustive, review of additive interaction measures and modeling strategies. It would indeed be interesting to evaluate whether tests for synergism in the sufficient-cause framework [
3,
4] could be mapped to concepts of intersectionality. …