Abstract
With journalism ethics increasingly coming under scrutiny, it can seem incongruous that editors continue to expect novice journalists to carry out ‘death knock’ stories, where they are expected to interview the victim’s next of kin to find out more about the person. Journalism students are seldom trained in how to deal with these sensitive interviews, instead, most practise on the public. Simple role-play exercises at Auckland University of Technology—using professional actors—highlight the significance of students ‘winging’ it. The lack of training for challenging but routine duties including death knocks can lead to emotional exhaustion, burn out and a greater chance of victims being retraumatized. This article focuses on the concept of emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983, The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press) and how it can affect journalists. According to Hochschild, emotional labour refers to the process by which people are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with work-defined rules and guidelines. In other words, this term describes the strategies that people adopt and that go beyond physical or mental duties. It is increasingly important that educators consider emotional labour, not only for the sake of graduates who will cover traumatic events but also for the reputation of journalism as a profession.
Introduction: Learning from the Medical Profession
In the 1980s the New Zealand medical profession was accused of both disregarding patients’ rights and lacking interpersonal skills in general. This stemmed from reports that some women being treated for cervical cancer at National Women’s Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, were involved in studies without their consent. As a result of an official enquiry, the country became the first to enshrine a patients’ code of rights in legislation. ‘Informed consent’ also became a crucial part of the relationship between doctors and patients (Patterson, 2012). Patients were required to be treated as consumers and fully informed about any procedure, and their permission was to be sought before any intervention. One of the report recommendations stated that the ‘university should improve the teaching of ethical principles and teaching skills at all levels during medical school training and encourage debate on medical-ethical topics’ (Cartwright, 1988, p. 176).
Patterson (2012) suggested that the release of the report led to a collapse of morale in the medical profession, because it questioned the professional ethics of all doctors. In many respects, journalism as a profession has been questioned in a similar way, after the 2012 Leveson Inquiry into the ethics, practices and culture of the British press, which followed a phone-hacking scandal involving the tabloid newspaper, the News of the World.
As a result of the criticism of the doctors, many medical schools throughout the Western world now teach ‘professionalism’ as well as communication skills and have developed codes of conduct. Journalism may need to follow suit. Already there are calls for informed consent before interviewing the newly bereaved (Muller, 2011). With more competition in the media, tighter budgets, staff cuts and increased trauma content in the news, the pressure to get a story has increased, putting both interviewee and journalist at risk (Beam & Spratt, 2009; Berrington & Jemphrey, 2003; Kay, Reilly, Amend & Kyle, 2011).
One way to improve the communication skills of journalism students is by using role-plays, which are encouraged in training health care professionals (Billings, 2012). Role-playing gives students the opportunity to learn and reflect on their abilities without doing any harm to the ‘client’ or to themselves. The encounters involve confronting unexpected emotions, both their own and others. However, this approach challenges traditional models of learning and teaching journalism, as it did in medicine.
Role-play in Journalism Education
Journalism education in New Zealand and Australia has followed the traditional model of learning, which is instructor focused (Greenberg, 2007). Journalism programmes are traditionally skill-based, for example, they cover newsgathering, news writing and shorthand. Researchers Adams and Duffield (2006) found that Australian journalism programmes were ‘somewhat weak in abstract learning’ (p. 26). Writing about New Zealand, Thomas (2008) suggested that little had changed in 20 years in journalism education and that journalism programmes resembled the ‘old-style apprenticeship training’ (p. 314). Her research showed that there was a lack of critical thinking about the industry and its practices, and the effects of work experience as well as the conditions and challenges of the modern media. She found that because New Zealand journalism programmes tended to focus on job skills, graduates often had an incomplete understanding of the pressures of the media industry they were entering. She recommended more debate about journalism education and more research, as well as a move away from the traditional ‘learning by doing’ to a more critical, reflective approach.
Reflective and critical thinking powers are necessary so that they are able to question the real meaning of what they [students] are told and to seek out the answers to deeper social problems and then write stories with significance and credibility. (Thomas, 2008, p. 315)
One of the challenges of the modern media is how death is covered (Barnes & Edmonds, 2015; Duncan, 2012; Kitch, 2000). Rather than reporting the basic facts—the ‘who, where, when, why and how’ details, for example, after a fatality—journalists are now expected to reflect the pain and suffering of the bereaved. ‘Emotive quotes from the bereaved are a prerequisite in the death knock story’ (Duncan, 2012, p. 591). Eliciting these emotions calls for the ability to show compassion so that reporters can then write a compelling story that combines facts as well as feelings. To carry out a successful interview that does not upset the bereaved requires genuine empathy, appropriate questions, allowing the interviewee to respond in their own time, as well as reflection on what went well and what could be improved. It also calls for self-control on behalf of the journalist so that they remain professional and do not become emotional.
Unfortunately the skills needed to interact with people under such stressful and unpredictable conditions do not usually come naturally. Without proper training, journalists may find their interviews with traumatized victims to be awkward, uncomfortable and, in extreme cases, even re-traumatizing. (Lockett John & Kawamoto, 2010)
Role-play has become an established pedagogy in education, law, social work and medicine (Billings, 2012). It involves engaging ‘learners in specified roles that are experienced and then reviewed and analyzed during a debriefing session’ (p. 201). The focus is on active, reflective learning, which is sometimes referred to as experiential learning. Dewey (1938) was the first educational theorist to identify experience as central to the learning process: he saw mistakes as learning opportunities. Dewey also introduced the concept of reflection, a form of problem-solving in order to resolve an issue.
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom identified the developmental skills in his 1956 taxonomy, which he then categorized within three ‘domains’: psychomotor, which are manual or physical skills; cognitive, which include mental skills such as acquiring knowledge; and affective, which involve growth in feelings or emotional areas. He proposed that affective learning would be achieved when a person developed interpersonal skills, but cautioned that these skills do not come naturally. Such skills, he argued, must be learned. Other educational theorists, for example, Bruner (1996) and Vygotsky (1978) have questioned Bloom’s theory of domains and preferred to view learning as a continuous process. They have also questioned whether everyone attains Piaget’s ‘formal operational stage.’ This is the final stage in Piaget’s 12 stages of cognitive development that begins at approximately age 11 and continues until 15–20 years (Piaget, 1959). This argument is an important consideration in trauma training, because to interview someone appropriately at the scene of a car accident or after a drowning, for example, is likely to involve higher learning abilities, including problem-solving, critical thinking and sometimes collaboration, as well as compassion and empathy.
Bourner (2003) used the terms ‘surface learning’ and ‘deep learning’ in relation to reflective learning. According to Bourner, unless people have attained these higher learning abilities through reflection, they will not be able to deal with emotions in an appropriate manner.
Surface learners are those who can describe their experience but do not ask searching questions of it; they simply take it at face value. Deep learners, by contrast, engage with their experience in a questioning way. In the domain of reflective thinkers, deep learners, like reflective thinkers, find more from their experience because they ask searching questions of it. (Bourner, 2003, p. 271)
Building on Dewey’s work, Kolb (1984) recognized that children had different styles of learning. He envisaged experiential learning—or learning through active involvement—as a cycle comprising four main stages. It begins with a concrete experience (or carrying out a core skill); reflective observation (talking or writing about carrying out that core skill); abstract conceptualization or theory building (thinking about how reflection would affect how a person carries out the skills) and active experimentation. The cycle then goes back to experience. Reflective learning, according to Bourner (2003), is not what happens to a student, but is what the student does with what has happened. Reflection can, therefore, be superficial, uncritical and not necessarily based on critical thinking (p. 270).
Bourner’s theory can be compared with the terms ‘deep acting’ and ‘surface acting’, terms used in organizational theories under the term ‘emotional labour’, coined by Arlie Hochschild (1983). According to Hochschild, emotional labour is the process by which people are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with work-defined rules and guidelines. With deep acting, employees attempt to modify their emotions so that a genuine, organizationally desired, emotional display results (Hochschild, 1983). Hochschild identified deep acting in a study of flight attendants. He found flight attendants dealt with angry and annoying passengers by thinking of them as frightened first-time fliers, therefore converting their emotions from annoyance into acceptance, pity and empathy. A study by Salmela showed that when employees engage in deep acting, they endeavour to express ‘authentic emotions’ which are ‘an authentic or genuine emotion that is a sincere and spontaneous response to the eliciting situation, founded on the subject’s spontaneous apprehension of the object that reliably manifests his or her concern for it’ (Salmela, 2005, p. 209). According to Hochschild, although not every attempt succeeds, emotions that are expressed as a result of deep acting are more likely to be authentic than those expressed through surface acting. Surface acting occurs when employees change only their outward emotion without altering their original, instinctive emotion. In surface acting, frustrated employees may suppress their frustration and simply smile at an annoying customer, thus ‘putting on a mask’ without actually changing their feelings and expressing feigned rather than genuine emotion (Grandey, 2003, p. 14).
Another factor of emotional labour is ‘integrative emotion’, where emotions such as friendliness are often highlighted as in service roles, or public contact encounters in which the services are intangible, consisting of services provided rather than objects that are possessed (Wharton & Erickson, 1993, p. 466). Because the ‘emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself’, display rules are oriented towards emotions that instil a sense of wellbeing, good will or satisfaction in customers (Hochschild, 1983, p. 5). For example, in her study of McDonald’s, Leidner (1991) found that the fast-food workers were told to be ‘cheerful and polite at all times’ and that ‘crew people were often scolded for not smiling’ (p. 160).
Stearns and Stearns (1986, p. 22) argue that masking of emotion is ‘an aspect of all work roles to some degree’ but that it is a more salient display norm in some work roles than others and is particularly prominent in middle management and most professions. For example, Jackall (1988) described the pressures on middle managers ‘to exercise iron self-control and to have the ability to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, agreeable public faces’ (p. 47). Other researchers have also noted how professionals are encouraged to mask emotion, a norm or display rule expressed as ‘detached concern’ (Hochschild, 1983, p. 150) or the avoidance of ‘too much liking or disliking’ (Lief & Fox, 1963, p. 13). As Smith and Kleinman (1989) noted, ‘because we associate authority in this society with an unemotional persona, affective neutrality reinforces professionals’ power and keeps clients from challenging them’ (p. 56). They went further by stating that one element of professional socialization, then, is ‘the development of appropriately controlled affect’ (p. 57).
Rather than examining each individual, Grandey (2003) examined the immediate emotional labour behaviours experienced by employees and customers, and the results demonstrated significant outcomes. First, service employees’ internal regulatory emotional labour strategies influenced customer outcomes and the customers’ ability to judge the employees’ strategies accurately affects these impacts. Another important aspect was that deep acting provided positive benefits for customers, a result that is in line with Grandey’s research that shows the positive benefits of deep acting for workers (Grandey, 2003). Deep acting, therefore, emerged as an important driver of service delivery outcomes as perceived ‘customer’ orientation and service quality. Surface acting, however, does not exert the same positive effect as those benefits from deep acting that were highlighted in Grandey’s study (2003). The difference between deep and surface acting sheds light on the crucial role of customers’ accuracy in detecting employees’ strategies; results highlight surface acting in exerting negative effects when customers perceive it as such. In other words, surface acting is not a problem as long as customers do not recognize it. No matter what emotion is surfaced or acted upon, there is a certain range in which this emotion can be detected in reference to emotional dissonance. This is the discrepancy between felt emotions on one hand and the emotional display that is required that is appropriate in the context of work (Zapf, 2002).
Researchers in the emotional labour field have shown that emotional dissonance is an antecedent to employee burnout or exhaustion (Abraham, 2000; Morris & Feldman, 1996; Wharton & Erickson, 1993). People tend to feel more depressed by masking their inner emotions; they break down emotionally in unexpected bursts and fail to mask their emotions in a competent, well-balanced and healthy manner (Morris & Feldman, 1996).
Research has found high rates of mental ill-health among groups of journalists, especially those covering emotionally charged stories and natural disasters (Dworznik & Grubb, 2007; Feinstein, Owen, & Blair, 2002). In addition to this, research into the effects of emotional labour on domestic reporters working on crime, health or accidents has also been initiated. For example, Dworznik’s study (2006) on the vulnerabilities of regional television reporters and photographers also discusses their emotion-management strategies.
The US-based Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and its European and Australasian branches have developed training guidelines that encourage journalists and journalism students to reflect on how they are emotionally situated in a story. These guidelines include detailed teaching notes on staging trauma and the use of role-play. Dart supporters suggest that ‘bringing reflexivity into this profession will aid journalists in minimizing adverse impacts on sources, maintaining their own resilience and making more informed news choices’ (Richards & Rees, 2011, p. 854).
Regardless of the reasons for a ‘bad interview’, the end result is usually a poorer story than could have been written had a better interview been conducted. Interviewees may be reluctant to speak candidly—or at all—to an insensitive interviewer or to share treasured mementos such as a photograph of a deceased loved one. More importantly, interviewing survivors of trauma with sensitivity and professionalism demonstrates ethical behaviour on the part of the journalist because it shows respect and empathy for the interviewee. (Lockett John & Kawamoto, 2010)
Organizational and pedagogical theories support incorporating deep learning or emotional labour into journalism programmes through active learning. This gives students practice at managing their emotions when dealing with distressed people. It also reminds them they have a job to do. ‘The reality of reporting is that you can’t just be empathetic. You must make sure you get the information you need to write your story’ (Lockett John & Kawamoto, 2010).
A survey of journalism programmes in Australia and New Zealand (Barnes, 2015) found that role-play was seldom used in trauma training. Questionnaires were sent to curriculum leaders or heads of schools at the 31 institutions in both countries with members of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia. Thirteen of the 16 respondents included trauma training in their programmes; 13 of them as lectures. Ten of the respondents felt not enough time was spent on the topic and highlighted confusion about what should be covered and how it should be approached.
Role-play can be a low-cost, effective way of achieving higher order learning and retaining valuable information (Bloom, 1956; Richards & Rees, 2011). It also offers students ‘an opportunity to refine their communication skills, identify feelings, develop problem-solving skills, collaborate or make decisions’ (Billings, 2012, p. 201). Reflection is a critical component. Whereas lectures are generally passive and do not require the student to process the information, role-play encourages evaluation and synthesis, and helps to prepare students to apply what they have learned to new and real situations (Bloom, 1956; DeNeve & Heppner, 1997). As Pearson (2000) observed,
[J]ournalists who can recognize a situation requiring problem-solving and who can then rally the requisite skills for researching and dealing with that problem, are going to be better equipped for dealing with a professional crisis than those who can merely remember a body of knowledge or accepted practice. (p. 30)
Niblock advocates reflective practice, as she argues that this is the best way to learn. ‘The goal in coaching students in “reflective practice in journalism” is one attempt to bring theory and practice into closer union’ (2007, p. 21). She sees it as a synthesis between journalism practice and theory. Whereas traditional journalists were discouraged from ‘wasting time’ reflecting on previous stories and decisions, and expected to think about the next story instead, she contends that that journalism practice is inherently reflective. She rejected the suggestions that journalists have a ‘gut instinct’ for news stories. She argued instead that journalistic knowledge is based on ‘reflection on action’, a term that Schön used in his 1983 theory on reflective learning (Schön, 1983). ‘Reflection on action’ is learning as a result of doing something, as opposed to ‘reflection in action’, which is learning while doing. Schön determined that it was wrong to separate thinking from doing because reflection is both complementary to action and a part of it. A critical component of role-play is self-learning, where students assess and reflect on the outcomes and consequences of their involvement in an exercise. Boud (1999) argued it involves learners in the processing of their experience in a wide range of ways, by exploring their understanding of what they are doing, why they are doing it as well as the impact it has on themselves and others.
The Auckland Study
The aim of introducing role-play to the journalism programme at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) was to give students the opportunity to practise dealing with traumatized and grieving people in a safe environment, rather than practising on the public. AUT uses role-plays to take students out of their comfort zones and, if the role-plays are balanced correctly, to provide a positive learning experience for the students. The intention is not to frighten them but make the students aware that people who are grieving may display a range of unexpected emotions.
The objective is to prepare graduates for the kind of work that young journalists often do early in their careers, for example, covering fires and murders. As Newton (2012) puts it when speaking at a Dart seminar: ‘You would never send out a sports reporter without them knowing the rules of football. So why send out journalists and reporters to cover something as sensitive as working with the bereaved without them knowing anything about bereavement’?
At AUT, professional actors play a vital role in trauma training. Because the actors also work with the local medical school in Auckland to help train doctors, they are already skilled in portraying a range of emotions that novice journalists are likely to encounter, for example, anger, tears, shock and silence. Rather than rolling with the punches, that is, encountering people who might abuse them verbally and upset them more because of their distress, the objective is to practise ‘death knocks’ so that those learning experiences might help to protect the bereaved and graduates alike. Death knocks require the journalist to visit or phone the next of kin to find out more about the victim and, if possible, obtain a photograph. Graduates need to know what questions are appropriate and also to learn positive strategies to protect themselves from the negative effects of dealing with raw emotions.
This study was based on the experiences of 18 postgraduate students who were completing a diploma in journalism programme at AUT. (The programme had been introduced two years earlier and is now offered each year. The students were initially given a lecture on dealing with trauma, which involved discussing how people react in different ways and why this may happen. This was followed a week later with two role-play interviews with ‘distressed’ people, both professional actors.)
After the role-plays, students were invited to discuss their experiences during a debriefing session and were asked to fill out a questionnaire which is discussed below. (All but one of the students who did the interviews completed the forms.) Debriefing is essential to ensure the objectives of the role-plays are achieved (Keats, 2010; Rees, 2007). For educators, feedback is also an important step in order to improve the exercise each year. As part of the evaluation, students are asked if they could identify areas for improvement in their approach or responses, and if they had changed their attitudes.
Results and Discussion
In this section each follow-up question is discussed and possible explanations offered. It is then considered in terms of its relationship to emotional labour.
Two clear themes emerged from student answers to this question. One was an obvious appreciation of having the chance to practise dealing with trauma before joining ‘the real world’, or a ‘test run’ before getting a job as one student put it. The other theme to emerge was how the exercise alerted them to their own (often unexpected) reactions. The word ‘real’ was repeated numerous times, suggesting the actors’ ability to convey the emotions was convincing. The reaction of the students was underpinned by the overarching theme of expressing their ‘real’ emotions authentic emotions were employed here which is a trait of deep acting (Salmela, 2005). Deep acting is where people endeavour display to authentic or genuine emotion that is a sincere and spontaneous response to the eliciting situation (Hochschild, 1983).
Nonverbal responses, including eye contact, body language and ‘making a person feel more relaxed’, were rated more highly than other skills. Several students commented on the importance of learning to wait, to pause for a response, rather than rush in with a follow-up question. This degree of self-control can be seen as surface acting, as students had to put on a mask to show that they were patient, calm and collected on the surface without altering their original, instinctive emotion of perhaps being frustrated, feeling pressured to get a response due to time constraints, and other feigned rather than genuine emotion.
This question elicited a range of responses, including a practical problem that many had not considered, of having to take notes at the same time as maintaining eye contact. Some encountered the embarrassment of running out of questions and having to deal with awkward silences. Others commented on involuntary responses, such as smiling at inappropriate times. This is called surface acting, where one may change only their outward emotion without altering their original, instinctive emotion (Grandey, 2003).
Some students mentioned their own body language, whereas others noted the body language of the ‘interviewee’ and how they responded to that. Pausing, listening and eye contact were mentioned several times. The flow-on effect of how a student fed off the reactions of the interviewee reflects a degree of integrative emotion, because the ‘emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself’, and display rules are oriented towards emotions that instil a sense of well-being, good will or satisfaction in customers (Hochschild, 1983, p. 5). The way that student paused and became aware of how they reacted verbally and non-verbally indicates that this was expected of them in order to gain some responses from the interviewee.
This question was chosen to encourage student reflexivity. From their role-play experience, the students realized the importance of introducing themselves clearly, so the interviewee would know exactly whom they were talking to and what publication they worked for. Three of the students mentioned the inappropriateness of involuntarily smiling, and the distraction of taking notes while trying to maintain empathy. Several expressed their discomfort at asking direct questions about the victim, and how they felt they should have modified or softened their questions. In emotional theory, this is called masking of emotion, which is the act of how professionals are encouraged to mask emotion, a norm or display rule expressed as ‘detached concern’ (Hochschild, 1983, p. 150), or the avoidance of ‘too much liking or disliking’ (Lief & Fox, 1963, p. 13). The students felt that by smiling too much they risked not appearing to be empathic in and taking the emotions displayed by the interviewees seriously.
The students observed how awkward and uncomfortable some of their classmates were during the role-plays. Other comments included not knowing how to start or finish the interview and, again, the tendency to fill the silences. They reported that they were distracted by their classmates’ responses and emotions, which in turn may have affected their concentration and listening skills. This is an indication of emotional dissonance (Zapf, 2002).
This question was deliberately open-ended, to give the students an opportunity to comment freely on the experience. Most felt the exercise had changed their attitude. Some were obviously shocked, for example, ‘I hope I never have to do trauma reporting! Didn’t particularly enjoy the experience’ and ‘Yes. I have a lot of respect now for the reporters.’ One student summed it up by writing ‘planning is key, details are key, and sensitivity is key’. Others were more specific: how it was important to make interviewees ‘feel comfortable’; to be aware of how they act in front of the bereaved and the questions they ask: ‘be soft and discreet with questioning and don’t offer condolences’, and one student simply said how they needed to be open-minded.
Two students sounded confident in their responses, for example, ‘I feel fairly well equipped, even if I did make a couple of minor mistakes today.’ This statement sums up the rationale behind the exercise, that it is better to make mistakes in a role-play than on the job.
Possible future research would be to follow up with graduates to find out if the role-play exercises had an effect on them once they started work. Because the role-play interviews were brief and in groups, they were not truly reflective of what the graduates may experience once they begin working as journalists. But the fact that they had time to discuss emotions indicates the importance of emotional training and awareness. Research conducted by Hopper and Huxford (2015) found that with little or no training, emotional labour can have serious implications for reporters who engage in it: namely suppressing or a deferring of upsetting emotions.
Conclusion
Journalists are often criticized for their lack of sensitivity when dealing with victims (Dufresne, 2004; Maxson, 2000). It is important, therefore, that journalism graduates know how to interview people without retraumatizing them. Role-play complements traditional lectures, not only by reinforcing learning but by allowing for the different ways people learn (DeNeve & Heppner, 1997). Lectures can provide the information such as what happens to people who are experiencing trauma and why they can react irrationally, which can then be experienced in role-plays.
Role-play calls for a paradigmatic shift towards reflective learning, a two-way flow, so that ideas are not just flowing from theory to practice but also from practice to theory (Niblock, 2007). By being confronted by a range of emotions during role-play exercises, journalism students begin to understand how trauma can affect victims and next of kin—and realize the damage they can do to themselves if they are not aware of the risks. This requires deep learning to understand compassion and empathy, rather than surface learning whereby journalists simply ‘put on a face’ to get the story. Victims soon detect genuineness as their responses showed in Muller’s (2011) study. For example, following the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, Australia, in 2009, a journalist was granted an interview after he politely identified himself and asked permission to do so. But the news crew which arrived an hour later and stated ‘We’re here to interview you’ were not welcomed (Lyall, 2012).
By identifying how journalists are involved with emotional labour in their work, this concept provides a structure for students to examine their emotions and learn appropriate coping strategies. It is not being weak; instead, by introducing terms used in the emotional labour research such as deep acting, surface acting, authentic emotion, integrative emotion and masking emotion, this can in turn help reduce emotional dissonance in students dealing with death knocks. Therefore, the introduction of these emotional terms can give students more insight and awareness into how they can carry out death knocks in a more emotionally competent and wholesome approach.