A scoping review on the operationalization of intersectional health research methods in studies related to the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Purpose

The COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020 and became a global health crisis with devastating impacts. This scoping review maps the key findings of research about the pandemic that has operationalized intersectional research methods around the world. It also tracks how these studies have engaged with methodological tenets of oppression, comparison, relationality, complexity, and deconstruction.

Methods

Our search resulted in 14,487 articles, 5164 of which were duplicates, and 9297 studies that did not meet the inclusion criteria were excluded. In total, 14 articles were included in this review. We used thematic analysis to analyse themes within this work and Misra et al. (2021) intersectional research framework to analyse the uptake of intersectional methods within such studies.

Results

The research related to the COVID-19 pandemic globally is paying attention to issues around the financial impacts of the pandemic, discrimination, gendered impacts, impacts of and on social ties, and implications for mental health. We also found strong uptake of centring research in the context of oppression, but less attention is being paid to comparison, relationality, complexity, and deconstruction.

Conclusions

Our findings show the importance of intersectional research within public health policy formation, as well as room for greater rigour in the use of intersectional methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• intersectional methods
• COVID-19
• public health
• scoping review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical statement

Our study did not require ethical board approval, it is a scoping review, and we did not conduct human or animal trials.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17482631.2024.2302305

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Alberta, Edmonton Canada.

Notes on contributors

Adedoyin Olanlesi-Aliu

Dr. Adedoyin Olanlesi-Aliu is a research coordinator at the Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta. Adedoyin holds a Ph.D. in Nursing from the University of Western Cape, South Africa. She completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta. Her area of research includes Access to health care for Black women, the Mental Health of Black Youth, and the intersection of gender and race.

Mia Tulli

Mia Tulli is a research coordinator for the Health in Immigration Policies and Practices Research Program at the University of Alberta. She has an MA in Political Science. Her research interests focus on intersections of gender, race, and migration with an emphasis on newcomers’ health and access to services in Canada.

Janet Kemei

Dr. Janet Kemei is an assistant professor at MacEwan university, Alberta, Canada. She holds a PhD in Nursing at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include immigrant maternal and child health, access to healthcare and mental health services by Black women, and health inequities. Janet completed Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta. This role enhanced her expertise in intersectional gender research and research with marginalized populations. She also holds a Master of Science in healthcare administration and has over 20 years of international experience in academia, clinical, management, and nursing research. She is a qualitative researcher and has published several articles in peer reviewed journals. She is also a reviewer in several peer reviewed journals. Janet incorporates her knowledge and expertise in nursing practice, research, policy, leadership, and education to teach nursing students by integrating career and educational goal explorations into course assignments. She exposes students to global and local health priorities, including diversity in health and health inequalities and inequities.

Glenda Bonifacio

Glenda Bonifacio is a professor in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities; editor of four books on feminism and migration, youth and migration, gender and rural migration, and gender and feminisms; co-editor of four books on women and religion, disasters in the Philippines, immigration in small cities, and racism in Alberta. She is a research fellow of the Network for Education and Research and Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) at Hiroshima University, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Small Islands Culture Research Initiative (SICRI).

Linda C. Reif

Professor Linda C. Reif is a Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, where she teaches international human rights law and international business law. She has published extensively on national human rights institutions, ombuds institutions, business and human rights, and international trade law. Her recent publications include Ombuds Institutions, Good Governance and the International Human Rights System (Brill/Nijhoff, 2d revised edition, 2020), co-authorship of Kindred’s International Law: Chiefly as Interpreted and Applied in Canada (Emond, 9th edition, 2019) and law review articles in the Harvard Human Rights Journal and Human Rights Law Review. Professor Reif has provided editing, consulting and academic services to organizations such as the Commonwealth Secretariat, International Ombudsman Institute (IOI), Academic Council on the UN System (ACUNS), Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada. She has served as her Faculty’s Associate Dean (Graduate Studies), most recently in 2019–2022.

Valentina Cardo

Valentina Cardo is an associate Professor of Politics and Identity at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Co-lead Winchester School of Art Director of Internationalisation. Valentina’s teaching and research expertise are located within the broader field of political communication, journalism, and gender politics. She has published her research on topics such as celebrity politics, e-government, gender and politics and popular culture and citizenship. Her research and teaching branch across three interconnected strands: questions of power, identity, and difference; the changing relationship between the media and modes of political and civic agency; and the impact of digital technologies on traditional communication strategies. She has taught on undergraduate and postgraduate courses on online media and democracy; gender, politics and media; and journalism. She also supervised a number of PhD students in these research areas.

Hannah Roche

Hannah Roche is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of York, where she teaches on queer modernism and intersectional feminism. She is the author of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia University Press, 2019) along with essays in Modernism/modernity, Essays in Criticism, Textual Practice, and Modernist Cultures. Hannah is co-editor of the first Oxford World’s Classics edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (forthcoming 2024).

Natasha Hurley

Dr. Natasha Hurley is Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She has also served as Senior Director of the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, Director of Media and Technology Studies Unit and as both Director and Associate Director of Intersections of Gender Signature Area at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Circulating Queerness (Minnesota, 2018) and co-editor of Curiouser: on the Queerness of Children (Minnesota 2004). She has published on topics in 19^th-century American literature, children’s literature, queer theory, trans studies, psychoanalysis, and intersectionality in venues including American Literature, Cultural Critique, ESC: English Studies in Canada, SAF: Studies in American Fiction, and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. She is co-winner of Foerster Prize for best essay in American Literature (2003), the Priestley Prize for best essay in ESC: English Studies in Canada (2011), and the Henig Cohen Prize for best essay or book chapter on Herman Melville (2018). Her research has been funded by a wide range of agencies including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and (with Dr. Bukola Salami as PI) the World Universities Network and Women’s and Gender Equality Canada.

Bukola Salami

Dr. Bukola Salami is a Professor at the Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Nursing. Her main area of research is immigrant and Black peoples health. She has been involved in over 85 funded research projects totalling over $220 million. She has published over 110 papers in peer reviewed journals. In 2020, she founded the Black Youth Mentorship and Leadership Program at the University of Alberta with the support of 15 Black faculty members. In 2018, she created the African Child and Youth Migration Network, a network of 42 researchers across the globe focused on African child and youth migration. Dr. Salami has provided consultations to policymakers and practitioners at local, provincial, and national levels, including the Prime Minister of Canada and the Canadian Federal House of Commons (or parliament). Her work on mental health of Black youths contributed to the creation of a mental health clinic for Black populations in Alberta. She has received several awards for research excellence and community engagement.