Developing a research topic

For me, determining the topic of my research has been a simple thing to do. Since I heard a story by a coworker nearly seven years ago, I have been convinced that I wanted to learn more about the effects journalists experience as a result of covering traumatic events.

The story came from my friend, Ann DeFrange, a columnist at The Oklahoman. She told me about how about a month after she was one of the first reporters to arrive on the scene of the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing she started to cry when the newsroom received a care package from a newspaper in Rockford, Ill. DeFrange said the experience was so moving to her because she thought finally someone really understood what the reporters were experiencing.
She also told me about the events of the month and how they affected her and her coworkers. They spent weeks at the office with little time off, even for sleep. They ate in the newspaper’s dining commons or in the newsroom, and showered in the fitness center locker room while relationships with family and friends and their physical and mental health fell apart.

DeFrange said she thought the work conditions were the most traumatic thing the journalists experienced, although she admitted that the reporters “over achieved,” going beyond what editors and supervisors asked them to do. DeFrange knew people who were in the bombing, but they were not family members. She owed them nothing, but she and her colleagues did what they thought the journalism code required them to do – they pretended not be affected, not to grieve, and did the job.

I worked in the newsroom and saw how these same reporters responded to the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center. It was an amazing array of emotions that I didn’t then fully understand. I saw many of them seep back into a depression that had been lingering under the surface while others became angry about New York stealing their title for “worst terrorist attack.” I didn’t fully understand the emotions or comments at the time, although I recognized some of them from my initial research into journalists suffering from trauma.

I began studying trauma through a Victims in the Media course at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. I took the course as part of my emphasis in journalism during my education master’s work. The course was sponsored by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which is the primary resource for information on the topic. Through my studies I discovered that one of my editors at The Oklahoman, Joe Hight, is extremely involved in the Dart Center and actually helped UCO obtain the grant to teach the class. He has become a wonderful resource for me in my quest for knowledge on the topic.

It was in the same class that I was introduced to the textbook Covering Violence by William Cote and Roger Simpson (2006). The book provides a foundation for thinking about covering violence and how it affects those who are covered and the reporters covering it. Reading the textbook helped me identify three main researchers in the field: William Cote’, Roger Simpson and Frank Ochberg. From continuing to read works by those scholars and cross-referencing their reference pages I have found a variety of scholarly works on the topic. I also have identified a variety of articles in Quill, the Society of Professional Journalists’ magazine, that have been useful in identifying scholars in the field.

My biggest concern at this point is not what I’m going to study but how I’m going to study it. I previously believed that I had identified a worthy research topic in simply discovering if journalists could become victims of trauma based on the stories they cover. However, since I identified this topic there have been a variety of professional and scholarly works that have presented it as fact. Now I am faced with trying to take a topic I am passionate about and determine what the real questions are that must be asked.