Insights about Researching Discouraged Workers

Abstract

Discouraged workers, who want to work but have given up looking for employment, form a socially marginalized group whose occupations and experiences remain poorly researched. As such, discouraged workers and their situations offer new avenues for inquiry about occupation, well-being, justice, and the relationships between them. Yet discouraged workers' peripheral social standing both justifies a need for research and complicates its execution. This article describes how experiences in the field reframed an ethnographic study of discouraged workers in rural North Carolina. The authors (the researcher and one discouraged worker) suggest that the second author's disappearance fostered collaborative opportunities and understandings that were initially unavailable to the study, and argue that the research situation itself began to mirror the uncertainty inherent in discouraged workers' situation. The insights derived from the phenomenon of disappearance provide valuable information for planning, executing, and evaluating future occupational science research on marginalized populations like discouraged workers.

Keywords:

• Unemployment
• Marginalization
• Research methodology
• Transaction
• Occupational justice

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a presentation given at the Society for the Study of Occupation: USA conference in New Haven, CT, October 14–16, 2009. Rebecca Aldrich would like to thank Yada Callanan for sharing her time, her story, and her journals, and for collaborating on this paper. Aldrich would also like to thank her adviser, Dr. Virginia Dickie, for her many conversations during the research process and her feedback on an early version of this paper; attendees at the SSO:USA conference, who stimulated her thinking about this research; two anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly strengthened this article; and Drs. Lynn Shaw and Staffan Josephsson, who read this paper prior to its initial submission.

Yada Callanan acknowledges Moses Cone Hospital and Daymark for helping her get through the mental strain and stress and depression, and for their continued support; Pastor Jeremy Sink, who sat with her for 7 hours in the emergency room making sure she got help, and who has coached her spiritually through this difficult time; and Beccy Aldrich, for caring and publishing something that will hopefully help others in this horrible economic and judgmental time.

This study was funded in part by a Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award and an American Occupational Therapy Foundation Dissertation Research Grant awarded to Rebecca Aldrich.

Notes

1. IRB approval for this study was granted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the consultant signed a consent to have her name used in publications related to this research.

2. A pseudonym.