Learning and Teaching in the Field: Dr. Sarah Tracy

 

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Interviewer: 
Michael Jung, feature writer, Office of University Initiatives

 

Interviewee:

Dr. Sarah Tracy, associate professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication and director of The Project for Wellness and Work-Life in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication

 

Most university researchers don’t spend their Saturdays shadowing 911 emergency call takers or interviewing correctional officers, but then most researchers aren’t Dr. Sarah Tracy. For years Dr. Tracy has worked with the community to see how communication theory can address real world problems. Now an ASU associate professor, she teaches her methodology to students and advocates a problem-based approach to research.

 

I spoke with Dr. Tracy and learned of her views on fieldwork, working with outside organizations, and how university research can be shared with the community.   

 

MJ: Sarah, thank you for meeting with me. I’d like to start by asking you to give me an overview of your research and how it benefits community organizations.

 

ST: Well I describe my research as “contextual problem-based, use-inspired research”, meaning I go into real world organizational settings and focus on difficulties these organizations are having. And then, hopefully, I can bring in the theoretical knowledge I have and shed some light on these issues, which can lead to suggestions for how to deal with these problems and the possibility for transformation in the organization.

 

In particular, my research focuses on issues of burnout, stress, and emotion labor in the workplace. In the past, I’ve worked with 911 call takers and prison correctional officers, among other employee populations.

 

MJ: What problems were you researching at 911 emergency centers?   

 

ST: This was a research project I began when I was a graduate student in the mid 1990s. It started with this media frenzy; there was a case in Pennsylvania where a gentleman had been beaten to death by a baseball bat – and although three or four calls had come into 911 the police weren’t dispatched in a timely manner. And there were other stories from Chicago about 911 operators watching TV and not doing their job.

 

So I wanted to go in, hang out with 911 operators and find out why this was happening. And as I spent time with them, I learned 911 call takers are not paid to just dispatch information but also to keep calm in tragic situations, even when they’re hurting. It’s an issue called emotion labor, which is something we experience when we are paid to show a certain emotional response and don’t really feel that way, which can lead to work stress.

 

And as I studied this issue of emotion labor with 911 call takers I saw one of the major ways they dealt with it was by talking with other call takers. But in some 911 centers the cubicles are so far apart that call-takers can’t chat and prepare themselves for their next call. So one recommendation from my research is it’s important for people doing stressful work to be put close together so they can laugh between calls and make sense of the stressful and sometimes bizarre situations they encounter.

 

MJ: Like a cool-down period.

 

ST: Right. I also found that 911 call takers are not trained to ask the type of questions most people who are experiencing tragedy would want to answer.

 

For instance if you call 911, and there’s an intruder in your house, all you want is help. But the call taker needs to get this descriptive information – “What does he look like? What is he doing now?” Unfortunately when people are asked these questions without contextualization it’s heard as, “I don’t believe you.” And so one of my suggestions was that call takers sometimes need to provide a context for the questions – they could say, “I need to know what he looks like – I believe he’s there – but what does he look like so we can identify him?”

 

So I usually start with a societal or organizational problem and go in not knowing what I’ll learn – who knew the questioning sequence and how close 911 call takers sat to each other had anything to do with why 911 was good or bad? But these are the things field work reveals.

 

MJ:  A lot of ASU students are interested in working with community organizations. Can you tell me about the challenges you encountered as a student when you broke into this kind of work?
 
ST: Sure. When I decided as a graduate student that I wanted to study in a correctional facility I had no connections with anyone and I knew it would be difficult to get access into a prison system. So it was a really “seven degrees of separation” kind of thing.

 

I started by looking at the research and found two professors who worked in prisons. They gave me the number for a gentleman who had been a jail captain and he gave me contact information for people he knew in jails and the Department of Corrections. Through this, I got in touch with the volunteer coordinator of a prison and offered to do research for the facility – they would have access to my research and I was able to do ten months of fieldwork where I followed the guards around and conducted interviews.

 

MJ: What problems did you study in the correctional facility?

 

ST: My focus was on correctional officers – the emotional highs and lows of their jobs. There’s this startling statistic that correctional officers have an average life expectancy of only 59 years. And while there’s lots of research on prisoners, the correctional officer is often ignored. So I wanted to find out some of the causes for their high level of burnout.

 

And one of the things I found was that officers are expected to follow organizational norms that contradict each other. They’re supposed to respect inmates, but they’re supposed to suspect inmates. They’re supposed to nurture, yet they’re supposed to discipline. They’re supposed to be flexible yet be consistent. And these edicts can catch correctional officers in double binds which, according to systems research, can make you feel paranoid, withdrawn, and literalistic.

 

Of course, I can’t say that the contradictions have everything to do with the 59-year-old life expectancy, but they are one part of the puzzle of why correctional officers experience high levels of stress and burnout. And while you can’t and shouldn’t rid the organization of these contradictions, theory tells us that by talking to people caught in double binds and acknowledging how complex it is to deal with the contradictions, you can help a person escape that bind.

 

MJ: How did you share these findings so correctional facilities can benefit from them?

 

ST: I presented my findings to all the folks in the correctional facilities where I did my fieldwork – and that was interesting because it was as though I was telling them something they knew but had never pieced together before. I also did a couple full day training sessions with the Colorado Jail Association about the issue of contradictions, how it related to burnout, and how the organization can deal with it. And I wrote an article for Corrections Today, one of the largest trade journals for the correctional industry – it was a good way to translate my research and get it out to a wider, non-academic audience.   

 

MJ: How do you develop a good working relationship with your partners?

 

ST: I use a lot of ideas that I’ve gathered from participant-action research – the idea that the people I’m studying are not subjects to do research on, but rather they’re participants in the research. For instance sometimes I’ll go back to my interviewees after I’ve analyzed my field notes and say, “This is what I think I see happening here – what do you think?” And they’ll analyze the data with me, and I’ll take in their interpretation as further data. A lot of times it makes the analysis smarter. Usually this co-analysis is the last part of my data gathering.

 

MJ: Now that you’re a tenured professor at ASU, do you teach socially embedded research in your classes?

 

ST: I do. I teach the Advanced Qualitative Research Methods class frequently in the Hugh Downs School and organize the course around this problem-based approach. One of my past students Sarah McKinnon, for instance, has done her Masters thesis on the Lost Boys of Sudan using research she began in my class – she did her fieldwork with the Sudan refugees.

 

MJ: What kind of socially embedded research have you been involved with recently?

 

ST: Right now I’m involved in a project on workplace bullying with a former student, Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, and ASU professor Jess Alberts. We’ve begun the only study I know of in the United States to qualitatively make sense of the emotional costs of workplace bullying, such as feelings of isolation, stigmatization, feeling crazy and like an abused child.

 

This particular project does not involve field work – we do interviews and focus groups with bully targets who work in all sorts of work environments, from education to city government to airfield to religious education. They face workplace bullying from a variety of sources from their supervisors to their colleagues.

 

We use a methodology where we have targets draw pictures of what bullying feels like because a lot of research suggests people who have experienced trauma are not able to articulate it very well in words. And then I can take their pictures, identify metaphors for what bullying feels like and say to HR people, “Bullying feels like you’re an abused child, like you’re being fed a noxious substance etc.” By identifying those things, if HR sees employees who look like they’re being tortured or frightened, they’re able to identify and deal with possible cases of workplace bullying.

 

MJ: How will you share these findings with the community?

 

ST: We’ve published a couple scholarly articles, and gotten some good media attention based off of these. Additionally, we just did a dramatic performance on workplace bullying at the Empty Space Theater in March to help audiences realize the emotional cost of this type of bullying. Now I think that sort of thing is extremely valuable. Just getting the word “workplace bullying” out into the American lexicon is important since a lot of people don’t know workplace bullying exists. It’s like the concept of sexual harassment – before the 1970s court case when “sexual harassment” was termed we didn’t have a way to talk about or make sense of this problematic behavior.

 

Our team also just published a white paper on our web site called “How to Bust a Bully: Telling Your Story So it Affects Change” – it talks about why people don’t believe targets of workplace bullying when they tell their story and gives suggestions for how these people can make others believe them. This is a practical-based paper – it builds on our scholarship and theoretical background, but the focus and audience are targets of bullying, not scholars. So we’re going to link it to a number of other bully web sites where bully targets can be directed to our paper.

 

I think one of the challenges about community-embedded research is that right now, most universities do not have a clear structure on how to reward this sort of “White Paper.” I wish that we could figure out a way so that such papers counted more toward tenure or promotions – but it’s not really valued compared to juried research or theoretical papers.

 

MJ: And yet it’s the type of paper a more mainstream audience would read.

 

ST: Right. Based off the white paper and media hits, I get many emails and phone calls from bully targets saying, “Thank you for knowing what our problem was”, which gives me great personal gratification. However, it doesn’t show up on a faculty activity report stating how many hours I spent transforming our scholarly research into a white paper that will help targets of bullying better tell their stories. So I think as ASU becomes more interested in faculty doing community embedded research, we’re going to have to strategize how best we can recognize what good community embeddedness is and how to reward it.          

 

MJ: How do you feel socially embedded work should be recognized by the university?

 

ST: I’d say it’s complicated, but for instance right now getting this bullying research out to the public is listed under service and I think some of it should be evaluated under research because it’s my research that has been able to impact folks. And maybe we need to look at how much of our research is read not only by academics but by the lay person. The lay person is reading MSN and looking up things on Google and trade journals and so on. I don’t think everyone’s research needs to be evaluated by its practical impact but we could bring up that practical impact so it’s not so subordinated to theory building.

 

In fact, in a recent essay I argued that social science research is exceptionally well-poised to address pressing social and organizational problems—something called “phronetic research.” To value phronetic research that comes in forms outside of traditional scholary books and articles, though, I think we need something standardized so people are able to compare and contrast the impact of our community involvement. That’s the thing now with referee journal articles and citation indexes – they give us a baseline to see the impact of our research. And right now we don’t have an auditing tool for community embededdness.

 

MJ: Sarah, thank you for sharing your thoughts on socially embedded work. I’d like to end by asking you what is the most rewarding part of your research?

 

ST: Well first of all it’s very humbling – I’m consistently reminded of what I do not know and how much I have to learn. One of the things I’ve always had a desire to do is tell the story of organizational settings that people think they know about, but probably don’t. So people have this idea that they know what 911 centers and prisons are like from media representations – but they are very different from the TV shows. 

 

Doing this research is also a check – it consistently reminds me that I need to be cognizant of how the concepts that I teach in the classroom or lecture in a roomful of academics might make sense or have any relevance to lay people. So I think it fundamentally helps me do better research.

 

MJ: Thank you for your time.

 

ST: Thank you.

 

Dr. Sarah Tracy is the director of the Project for Wellness and Worklife, an ASU strategic initiative that studies issues directly connected to wellness including burnout, emotion labor, and work-life balance.

 

Students and faculty interested in engaging in socially embedded fieldwork are invited to read the following essay which gives detailed strategies for working with community organizations. The essay is available through the ASU library database:

Tracy, S. J. (2007). Taking the Plunge: A Contextual Approach to Problem-Based Research. Essay for “Theorizing Communication Problems.” Communication Monographs, 74, 106-111.

 

Dr. Tracy’s white paper “How to Bust a Bully: Telling Your Story So It Affects Change” is available online and provides strategies for addressing workplace bullying.

 

Date of Interview:  January 19, 2006

 

Michael Jung, ASU in the Community feature writer
Michael.Jung@asu.edu
(480) 965-0335

 

To learn more about how ASU is engaged with the community, please visit ASU in the Community’s Program Database which connects you to a wide variety of specific ASU outreach efforts.