Sociology and Anthropology

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/55

Drawing on the expertise and commitment of our research-active faculty, the MSU Sociology and Anthropology provide excellent educational experiences to undergraduate majors, minors and MSU as a whole. The unifying theme of the department is the study of societies – past and present – embedded in the tradition of the liberal arts.

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Advancing a Model of Secondary Trauma: Consequences for Victim Service Providers
(2018-05) Ellis, Colter; Knight, Kelly E.
A burgeoning body of scholarship is attempting to understand, normalize, and ameliorate the emotional strain of victim service provision. The literature, however, has yet to fully theorize the hazardous process of empathetic engagement with victims. As a result, concepts, mechanisms, and outcomes are often conflated, making it difficult to understand the etiological path of this occupational risk. The goal of this article is to attend to this gap by accomplishing three objectives. The first is to engage with the perspective of symbolic interaction to theoretically ground a conceptual model of secondary trauma. The second objective is to propose a model of secondary trauma that acknowledges its inherently interactional, interpretive, and, thus, vicariously transmissible nature. The third objective is to begin the work of empirically supporting this model with data from a sample of victim service providers ( n = 94) collected using in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic participant observation, and community-based participatory research. Our findings suggest that victim service provision, in the form of empathetic engagement, can blur the boundary between self and other, and lead to a sense of damage in the self that manifests in unreliable self-agency, untrustworthy coherence of other, desensitized self-affectivity, and fractured self-history. This work has significant implications. We illustrate an important paradox by showing how victim service provision can be helpful to victims but harmful to providers. We also offer a pathway for reducing this harm. By specifying mechanisms of damage, the model can be used to inform policies and practices supportive of victim service providers' health and well-being.
Determinants of Poor Health Among Workers in Criminal Justice, Community and Social Services, and Healthcare: Adverse Childhood Experiences, Workplace Trauma Exposure, and Gender Differences
(Informa UK Limited, 2021-12) Knight, Kelly E.; Ellis, Colter; Neu, Joshua; Miller, Tristan; Talcott, Amy K.
Adverse childhood experiences and workplace trauma exposure are associated with poor health. However, their differential impacts by gender are difficult to assess in studies of organizations with gender imbalances (e.g., law enforcement officers are more likely men whereas social workers are more likely women). Using a community-based participatory research framework, this study examines trauma exposure, mental and physical health, and substance use in an occupationally diverse sample (n = 391). Trauma exposure was high and associated with poor health. Even though women experienced more adversity, they were often more resilient than men. Implications for trauma-informed workplaces are discussed.
Developing a Response to Secondary Trauma for American Indian and Rural Service Providers
(The Ohio State University Libraries, 2022-05) Knight, Kelly E.; Ellis, Colter; Matt Salois, Emily
How can victim service providers, the organizations they work for, and the communities they serve help respond to the issue of occupation-based secondary trauma? Over the last few years, federal agencies in the United States have spent millions in research and programming to answer this important scientific and policy question. The current study builds on this work by describing and evaluating a community-based participatory research project focused on finding manageable, effective, sustainable, and ethical ways to respond to occupation-based secondary trauma in two separate communities: a rural American Indian community, Blackfeet Tribal Nation, and a predominantly white county in Montana, Gallatin County, United States. Findings from evaluation questionnaires (n=178; 80.10% women; 64.60% American Indian; 29.14% White) representing a wide range of occupations document that: (1) the implementation of the project was successful; (2) toolkits created for the project were useful to both individual participants and organizations; (3) training outcomes improved significantly; and (4) findings were consistent across the two different community contexts. Contributions, lessons learned, and future directions are discussed.
Does Where You Work and What You Do Matter? Testing the Role of Organizational Context and Job Type for Future Study of Occupation-Based Secondary Trauma Intervention Development
(Sage Journals, 2023-12) Knight, Kelly E.; Ellis, Colter; Miller, Tristan; Neu, Joshua; Helfrich, Leah
Organizational context (e.g., criminal justice, community-based, and healthcare) and job type (e.g., police, social workers, and healthcare providers) may impact the extent of occupation-based secondary trauma (OBST). Survey data collected from a multiphase community-based participatory research project were analyzed from a variety of professionals, who were likely to “encounter the consequences of traumatic events as part of their professional responsibilities” (n = 391, women = 55%, White = 92%). Results document high trauma exposure (adverse childhood experiences [ACEs] and workplace) and OBST-related outcomes (Maslach Burnout Inventory, Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale, post-traumatic stress disorder symptom checklist for DSM-5) for the entire sample with important differences across organizational context and job type. Using multivariate regression, the strongest determinants of suffering, however, were not related to a provider’s specific profession but to their number of years on the job and their ACEs (e.g., adjusted R2 = 0.23, b = 2.01, p < .001). Likewise, the most protective factors were not profession specific but rather the provider’s age and perceived effectiveness of OBST-related training (e.g., b = 2.26, p < .001). These findings inform intervention development and have implications for rural and other often under-resourced areas, where the same OBST-related intervention could potentially serve many different types of providers and organizations.
Hydraulic fracturing: Assessing self-reported familiarity and the contributions of selected sources to self-reported knowledge
(2017-01) Theodori, Gene L.; Ellis, Colter
Data collected from a random sample of individuals in two counties in the Eagle Ford Shale region of South Texas to examine (a) respondentsâ€™ self-reported familiarity with the process of hydraulic fracturing and (b) the associations between the contributions of information sources to self-reported knowledge about hydraulic fracturing and self-reported levels of familiarity with the process of hydraulic fracturing. The results of this study revealed that survey respondents in the Eagle Ford Shale region of Texas are more familiar with the process of hydraulic fracturing than has been reported in other studies. Moreover, the findings indicated that self-reported levels of familiarity with the process of hydraulic fracturing were positively associated with certain sources of information. Among those sources that reached statistical significance, the strongest contributor to respondentsâ€™ self-reported familiarity with hydraulic fracturing was information from the oil/natural gas industry.
Secondary Trauma in the Workplace: Tools for Awareness, Self-Care, and Organizational Responses in Montana
(Montana State University, 2018) Clements, Erin; Ellis, Colter; Knight, Kelly E.; McLane, Richard; Osterloth, Katharine; Powell, Christina; Saverud, Anna; Sherstad, Alanna; Talcotta, Amy Katherine; Young, Kelsen
This book is written for Montana’s victim service providers—the people who have chosen to dedicate their professional lives to helping the survivors of trauma. As providers, we are the ones working day in and day out with those who have endured some of the worst life has to offer, including sexual assault, child maltreatment, domestic violence, elder abuse, hate crimes, and other forms of violence, as well as traumas related to substance abuse, housing insecurity, accidents, natural disasters, and war. For those of us in this line of work, secondary trauma—an umbrella term for the trauma that results from repeated empathetic engagement with traumatized populations—is a very real and very serious issue. Secondary trauma can result in a whole assortment of physical and emotional issues, as well as contribute to staff turnover and shortages in providers. Like most providers working in Montana and across the nation, you may never have been taught that secondary trauma is a normal byproduct of your work, or been advised how you and the organization that employs you can effectively manage it. We want to change that.
Vulnerability of dryland agricultural regimes to economic and climatic change
(2018) Lawrence, Patrick G.; Maxwell, Bruce D.; Rew, Lisa J.; Ellis, Colter; Bekkerman, Anton
Large-scale agricultural systems are central to food production in North America, but their ubiquity could be threatened by vulnerability to economic and climatic stressors during the 21st century. Prior research has focused on understanding the influence of climatic changes on physiological processes in these systems and has increasingly recognized that other factors such as social, economic, and ecological variation and the interaction among these factors may cause unexpected outcomes. We assess the vulnerability of large-scale agricultural systems to variation in multiple stressors and investigate alternative adaptation strategies under novel conditions. We examine dryland farms in Montana’s northern Great Plains (NGP), which represent large-scale semiarid agricultural systems that are likely to be affected by climate change. Farmers in the NGP have experienced three distinct periods of economic- and drought-related stressors since the 1970s, primarily driven by uncertainty in soil moisture, but at times amplified by uncertainty in nitrogen fertilizer and wheat prices. We seek to better understand how farmers evaluate and respond to these conditions. The results indicate that although farmers perceived few alternative agronomic options for adapting to drought, strategies for adapting to high input prices were more plentiful. Furthermore, we find that increasing the overall resilience of dryland agricultural systems to economic and climatic uncertainty requires intrinsic valuation of crop rotations and their field-specific response to inputs.