Social Identities and Intersectionality: A Conversation About the What and the How of Development

Abstract

Research on the development of social identities in early and middle childhood has largely focused on gender; increasingly, however, theory and research have addressed the development of ethnic/racial, social class, sexual, and immigrant identities. Moreover, it is assumed that individuals’ thinking about and articulating of the intersectionality between their social identities emerge in adolescence and young adulthood, but a growing body of work has shown that minoritized children conceptualize their intersectional identities by middle childhood. This article reviews that work and addresses how interdisciplinary scholarship and quantitative and qualitative methodologies can deepen our understanding of the development of social identities and intersectionality. We take a contextual approach to investigate how relational and cultural contexts contour the socialization of social and intersectional identities. Most of our review focuses on theory and research in the United States; however, because we aim to consider immigrant identity, we also include theory and research on how immigrant families and communities help minoritized children and youth navigate their identities in schools and communities and cope with discrimination.

Paradoxes, uncertainty, and resistance: A psychology of meaning‐making at the margins

“…Just as paradoxes complicate binary thinking by highlighting the co-existence of multiple understandings at once (Anzaldúa, 2015), we benefit from imagining beyond the quantitative-qualitative binary to better attend to complexity in our research. Indeed, to capture the dynamic nature of meaning-making, as something responsive to the multiple and shifting social worlds that students inhabit, researchers should leverage multidisciplinary tools (for more discussion, see Azmitia et al, 2023;Fine & Sirin, 2007). We need methodologies that embrace contradictions, encourage reflexivity, and incorporate diverse methods, including dialectical critique (McNiff, 2013), critical race, intersectional, and decolonial approaches to quantitative methods (Adams & Stocks, 2008;Comas-Díaz et al, 2024;Covarrubias & Vélez, 2013;Covarrubias et al, 2018;Fattoracci et al, 2021;Langhout et al, 2022;Salter & Adams, 2013); master narrative methodology (Josselson & Hammack, 2021;Syed & McLean, 2021); participatory action research (Nguyen et al, 2024); and testimonios (Bernal, 2001;Burciaga et al, 2024;Fernández & Gamero, 2018;Silva et al, 2022).…”