In the mood for science: A discussion of emotion management in a pharmacogenomics research encounter in Denmark

Developing and validating a scale to measure teachers' emotional labor strategy in classrooms

Teachers' emotional labor is essential to teachers' instructional quality, psychological health, and students' learning effectiveness in classrooms. To assess how teachers manage their emotions to match the display rules of classrooms, this study developed and validated a self-report scale-the Teachers' Emotional Labor Strategy in Classrooms (TELSC)-through three rounds of investigation with secondary school teachers. First, strategies and item statements were collected through existing scales, an open-ended questionnaire, and interviews. Second, the pilot study was conducted, and the results of content validity and exploratory factor analysis confirmed the 17-item formal scale with four dimensions: surface acting, deep acting, expression of naturally felt emotions, and emotion termination. The third round investigated 491 teachers and validated the scale: confirmatory factor analyses verified the four-factor structure; correlations among the four subscales and average variance extracted indicated good discriminant validity; correlations between subscales and emotional exhaustion, teacher efficacy, and years of teaching showed good criterion validity; and Cronbach's α showed good reliability. Overall, the TELSC scale is an efficient instrument to measure the strategies that teachers use to manage their emotions in classrooms, and it can be applied to understand and improve teachers' professional competence in teaching and emotional interaction.

Precision patients: Selection practices and moral pathfinding in experimental oncology

This paper addresses selection practices in a Danish phase 1 unit specialised in precision medicine in the field of oncology. Where precision medicine holds the ambition of selecting genetically fit medicine for the patient, we find that precision medicine in the early trial setting is oriented towards selecting clinically and genetically fit patients for available treatment protocols. Investigating how phase 1 oncologists experience and respond to the moral challenges of selecting patients for early clinical trials, we show that inclusion criteria and patient categories are not always transparent to patients. Lack of transparency about inclusion criteria has been interpreted as morally problematic. Yet drawing on social science studies of 'unknowing', we argue that silence and non-transparency in interactions between oncologists and patients are crucial to respect the moral agency of patients at the edge of life and recognise them as belonging to the public of Danish health care. In the discussion, we consider the practice of placing 'unfit' patients on a waiting list for trial participation. Rather than representing an ethical and political problem, we argue, the waiting list can act as a valve enabling oncologists to navigate the scientific and as well as the moral uncertainties in phase 1 oncology.

Emotions as Causal Mechanisms and Strategic Resources for Action in the Study of Professions, Professionals, and Professional Service Firms

Professions are imbued with values that form the core of a professional’s identity. When professionals are faced with internal or external contradictions or affirmations of this identity, positive and negative emotions ensue, often fostering agency. While most research on professions focuses on cognitive and structural arguments to explain professional agency, we show the added benefit of examining emotions as (1) causal mechanisms fostering action and (2) strategic resources for action. We illustrate these ideas with data from a field study on French doctors specializing in reproductive medicine and dealing with the restrictive regulation on assisted medical procreation. We identify six research areas that would benefit from an explicit focus on emotions and suggest specific research questions and directions for future work for each.

Application of the community dialogues method to identify ethical values and priorities related to pharmacogenomics

Given the expansion of genetics in medicine, there is a growing need to develop approaches to engage patients in understanding how genetics affects their health. Various qualitative methods have been applied to gain a deeper understanding of patient perspectives in topics related to genetics. Community dialogues (CD) are a bi-directional research method that invites community members to discuss a pertinent, challenging topic over the course of a multi-week period and the community members openly discuss their positions on the topic. Authors discuss the first application of the CD method to the topic of pharmacogenetics testing. Additional CD are needed to engage diverse participant populations on this topic to improve genetics literacy, enhance physician engagement and drive policy change.

Taming Time: Configuring Cancer Patients as Research Subjects

This article explores how incurable cancer patients in the affluent Danish welfare state are recruited to clinical trials. We show that patients' impending death constitutes their potential for being configured as research subjects. To produce valuable data, patients who enroll in trials and health care professionals must engage in daily "time practices" that prolong the threshold between life and death. When death becomes inevitable, the limit of configuring dying cancer patients as research subjects is reached. Navigating this temporal logic, health care professionals balance the boundary between patients' instrumental worth as research subjects and their intrinsic worth as dying cancer patients. Whereas previous studies have critically uncovered how clinical trials operate at socioeconomic margins, we point to the ways in which clinical trials operate through temporal margins. We argue that clinical trials are dependent on configuring marginal societal spaces and marginal bodies from which to produce knowledge.

Courtesy work: Care practices for quality assurance in a cohort study

Accountability has become a buzzword in recent years, applied in such disparate fields as education, academia, international politics and economics. For cohort studies, epidemiological literature and guidelines put forward several ideals to assure the quality of the generated data to make it accountable. Social scientific scholarship in turn has shown that in practice, such demands can lead to tensions and needs for balance 'on the ground'. We take such insights as a starting point to explore these balancing acts. Based on an ethnographic investigation into the examination and data-gathering situations and practices within a German cohort study, we suggest that 'courtesy work' is intrinsic to the development of accountable data as a foundation for the establishment and stabilization of epidemiological facts. As such, courtesy work is part of accountable care work in epidemiological studies, which is in turn a key part of the quality assurance practices that ensure the enrollment and maintenance of people in a study, as well as the production of standardized measurement results.

Channeling hope: An ethnographic study of how research encounters become meaningful for families suffering from genetic disease in Pakistan

The Pakistani population has become particularly interesting for international genetic research due to its high rates of consanguinity. Based on 5 months fieldwork in Faisalabad among Pakistani genetic researchers from December 2015–January 2016 and February–April 2017 and interviews with 36 families and 14 researchers, this article focuses on research encounters. It demonstrates how genetic research figures in the lives of families affected by genetic medical conditions in light of their everyday struggles with disease, and considers their perspectives on destiny and hope. Through examining the potentials of the research encounter, we ask how research becomes meaningful in the lives of Pakistani families affected by genetic disease: how these families and individuals enable different modes of sharing tragic stories, contemplating hope and contesting logics of consanguinity. International genetic research depends on human raw material. If we wish to understand the precarious lives this research relies on, then the everyday struggles with disease, and the perspectives of families must be methodologically and theoretically engaged.

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Ethnographic study of genetic research encounters in Pakistan.

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Illustrates suffering and hopes of families responding to genetic disease.

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Discusses researcher-participant interaction in genetic research.

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Calls for a focus on how research participation becomes meaningful for families.

From waste to (fool's) gold: promissory and profit values of cord blood

According to biomedical discourse, cord blood has been transformed from 'waste' to 'clinical gold' because of its potential for use in treatments. Private cord blood banks deploy clinical discourse to market their services to prospective parents, encouraging them to pay to bank cord blood as a form of 'biological insurance' to ensure their child's future health. Social scientists have examined new forms of (bio)value produced in biological materials emergent with contemporary biotechnologies. This paper contributes to this literature by examining the social and technical production of value in cord blood units collected for private banking. Value, in this paper is defined as a socio-cultural concept in which an object is made meaningful, or valuable, through its relations with social actors and within specific regimes of value. I draw on in-depth interviews with women who banked cord blood and key informants in private banks in Canada, to analyze how social actors produced cord blood as a valuable biological object. I show that a cord blood unit holds promissory value for women who bank and profit value for private banks and that these values are folded into each other and the biological material itself. Analyzing how specific cord blood units are made valuable provides insight into the multiple and possibly competing values of biological materials and the tensions that may arise between social actors and forms of knowledge during the valuing process.

When biological scientists become health-care workers: emotional labour in embryology

STUDY QUESTION

Can biological scientists working in medically assisted reproduction (MAR) have a role as health-care workers and, if so, how do they engage in the emotional labour commonly associated with health-care work?

SUMMARY ANSWER

The scientists at Fertility Associates (FA) in New Zealand perform the technical and emotional cares associated with health-care work in an occupationally specific manner, which we refer to as a hybrid care style. Their emotional labour consists of managing difficult patients, 'talking up' bad news, finding strategies to sustain hope and meaning, and 'clicking' or 'not clicking' with individual patients.

WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY

Effective emotional labour is a key component of patient-centred care and is as important to the experience of high-quality MAR as excellent clinical and scientific technique.

STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION

This is a qualitative study based on open-ended interviews and ethnographic observations with 14 staff in 2 laboratories conducted over 2 separate periods of 3 weeks duration in 2007. Analysis of fieldnotes and interviews was conducted using thematic analysis and an NVivo qualitative database and compared for consistency across each interviewer.

PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS

The participants were consenting biological scientists working in one of the two laboratories. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 'quiet' work times, and supervised access was allowed to all parts of the laboratories and meeting places. Opportunities for participant review of results and cross comparison of independent analysis by authors increases the faithfulness of fit of this account to laboratory life.

MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE

The study suggests that emotional labour is a part of routinized scientific labour in MAR laboratories for FA.

LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION

This is a qualitative study and thus the findings are not generalizable to populations beyond the study participants.

WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS

While little has been published of the emotional component of scientist's working lives, there may be a New Zealand style of doing scientific work in MAR laboratories which is patient centred and which incorporates much higher patient contact and involvement than is experienced in other laboratories.

STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S)

This study was funded by a research grant from the University of Otago and was also partly funded by a Marsden Grant administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER

N/A.