ABSTRACT
Black females have often been viewed as a monolithic demographic with minimal to non-existent variance in lived experience. As a result of years of marginalization, it is without wonder that the current mental health literature continuously fails to dissect the vast deviations that actually exist among black females. Mullings’s work encourages researchers to incorporate an intersectional focus which highlights how race and gender are, in some sense, “not additive but rather interlocking, interactive, and relational categories, ‘multiplicative’ … ‘simultaneous’ … ‘mutually constituted’ … and characterized by ‘the articulation of multiple oppressions’” (Mullings 2005: 80). Moreover, the life course perspective calls researchers to consider how age embodies a system of stratification that differentially exposes groups to certain types and amounts of stressors, shapes their coping strategies and, in turn, creates variations in psychological distress. To understand mental health variations among black women across age, this research operates within a stress-health framework which maintains that researchers must understand how the unequal distributions of stress exposure (i.e., type and source of stress) and the coping strategies that groups draw on differentially affect mental health outcomes across social groups (Pearlin 1989; Thoits 2010).
