Intersectionality and MAIHDA Conference in Sheffield

In July, Isabelle Weissflog attended the Intersectionality and MAIHDA Conference, hosted at the University of Sheffield. The conference brought together researchers from diverse fields including public health, sociology, and social psychology to discuss the latest methodological advances in Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA). Highlights of the meeting included a keynote address by Dr. Clare Evans, the originator of the method, reviewing a decade of MAIHDA developments, alongside sessions on model extensions, simulation testing, and interdisciplinary critiques.

Isabelle contributed to the poster session with a presentation titled “When do quantitative intersectional effects manifest in person evaluations? A MAIHDA and Random Forest Modelling approach”, co-authored with Lusine Grigoryan and Wilhelm Hofmann. You can view the poster here.

About the study

In this project, we introduced a novel approach combining MAIHDA with additional analyses, including Random Forest Machine Learning, to understand how people evaluate others based on complex, multi-category social identities. Drawing on factorial survey experiment data across three countries (Germany, the UK, and the US) with over 9,000 observations manipulating nine distinct social dimensions, we systematically isolated non-additive intersectional effects in person evaluations using MAIHDA, and then went on to identify social group combinations for which intersectional effects are more likely to occur. Our findings demonstrated that configural properties of someone’s multiple group memberships — such as surprisingness of the combination, and the (in)congruence of stereotypes and evaluations between groups — can play a role in the emergence of intersectional evaluation biases.

The poster session sparked inspiring discussions with colleagues applying MAIHDA across diverse fields, from health equity to environmental justice. We are excited to build on these connections and impulses to continue exploring innovative methodological approaches to complex social cognitive processing!