Advancing the Sociology of Empathy: A Proposal

Ruiz‐Junco, Natalia

doi:10.1002/symb.306

Cited by 42 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(57 reference statements)

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“…This study has implications for the field of victim services. Our findings add to recent conversations questioning the positive and negative utility and ethics of empathy (e.g., Bloom, 2016; Ruiz-Junco, 2017). We illustrate an important paradox by showing how victim service provision can be helpful to victims but harmful to providers.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

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Advancing a Model of Secondary Trauma: Consequences for Victim Service Providers

Ellis

Knight

2018

J Interpers Violence

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…‘I’ becomes part of ‘we’” (p. 36). Ruiz-Junco (2017) frames this process as “self-transcendent” empathy, argues that it dilutes “the boundaries between self and other,” and notes that it tends to flourish in environments where empathizing with those who suffer is valued (p. 14).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advancing a Model of Secondary Trauma: Consequences for Victim Service Providers

Ellis

Knight

2018

J Interpers Violence

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“…Clark (:36) describes a “joint level” of empathy in which the sympathizer “loses the sense of separateness from the other.” The empathizer, according to Schwalbe (:88), feels with others rather than for them. This version of empathy also resembles Ruiz‐Junco's (:427) “self‐transcendent empathy path.”…”

Section: Restoring Deservingnessmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…Volunteers also expanded sympathy by connecting the experiences of beneficiaries to their own. Taking “the attitude of the other” allows us to imagine the pain and suffering of other people, or empathize (Clark ; Ruiz‐Junco ). This “perspective‐taking with the heart” facilitates our emotional responses to people (Schwalbe :88–91).…”

Section: Restoring Deservingnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“They Are Just Like You and Me”: Cultivating Volunteer Sympathy

Froyum

2018

Symbolic Interaction

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This study demonstrates the centrality of emotion work, especially sympathizing with beneficiaries of help, to sustaining volunteerism. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 42 volunteers and paid volunteer coordinators, it explains how volunteers cultivate sympathy, and thus commitment to helping, by framing beneficiaries as deserving. Volunteers constructed recipients as "deserving" along three dimensions: neediness, blamelessness, and impressionability. However, challenges to deservingness disrupted sympathizing, thereby undercutting volunteers' commitment. But rather than quit, volunteers were able to salvage beneficiaries' deservingness by pointing to authority, elaborating on victimhood, relating beneficiaries to their family and friends, and universalizing risks. Engaging in emotion work reinvested volunteers in volunteering.

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“…Likewise, these exchanges would take place within a feeling context that is affected by the social status of the interactants (see above). Similarly, the participants might employ empathy frames , empathy rules , and empathy performances (Ruiz‐Junco ) as they construct a cooperative account. Importantly, it is likely that some exchanges in which accounts are crafted occur when “emotions are running high” and are likely followed by emotional attributions associated with the untoward behavior.…”

Section: Propositions For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooperative Accounts: Avoiding Conflict and Repairing Social Relations

Poulson

Carter

Crowley

2017

Symbolic Interaction

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The analytical concept of accounts has long presented sociologists with an excellent tool for the study of talk. Nonetheless, studies of accounts often neglect the fact that cooperation is common when an account for untoward behavior is constructed. Many studies tend to flatten the process of how accounts are created by routinely describing them as being "offered" by offenders and then "evaluated" by reproachers. We assume that accounts are often negotiated between parties as a means of avoiding conflict and preserving a relationship. As such, this paper develops the concept of cooperative accounts that are offered to (or projected upon) offenders as a means of explaining their untoward behavior. While also examining hostile accounts, this paper concentrates on developing the cooperative account in order to investigate more fully Scott and Lyman's (1968) argument that accounts are crucial for managing conflict and maintaining social order. Because offering cooperative accounts to others is a routine social interaction their examination provides an opportunity to reanchor the study of accounts back into the symbolic interactionist tradition.

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Advancing the Sociology of Empathy: A Proposal

Cited by 42 publications

References 49 publications

Advancing a Model of Secondary Trauma: Consequences for Victim Service Providers

Advancing a Model of Secondary Trauma: Consequences for Victim Service Providers

“They Are Just Like You and Me”: Cultivating Volunteer Sympathy

Cooperative Accounts: Avoiding Conflict and Repairing Social Relations

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