Professor Amir Marvasti and student Travis Saylor give a STAR series presentation on their work.
In the first months of the pandemic that began in 2020, research focused on finding the source of and a cure for COVID-19. With the passage of time, researchers have started examining other impacts of this global tragedy. In the multi-contributor volume The Emerald Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions in a Post-Pandemic World, Penn State Altoona’s Professor of Sociology Amir Marvasti and Travis Saylor, a second-year psychology major and research assistant, have collaborated on a chapter titled “Constructing Heroism in the Time of Covid.”
Marvasti says the editors approached him to write a chapter for “a volume on COVID. They were interested in emotions across the board as they relate to how people managed the pandemic.” While he has written other works on courage, he knew he didn’t want to “redo what I’ve already done.” He told them, “I want to work with secondary data and, in fact, I have the data.” He also had a student who was interested in working with him.
“I wasn’t necessarily looking for a research project,” Saylor admits. But he is in the honors college, which has certain requirements. To fill those “I asked Dr. Marvasti if he had any extra work. I ended up doing a separate thing for the honors option with him, but he asked if I was interested in a research project on the way that courage is conceptualized in nursing, especially in the age of COVID.”
The chapter’s abstract elaborates on the subject: “In this chapter, we examine how the concept of heroism was defined and used during the Covid pandemic of 2020, particularly in connection with the nursing profession. The analysis will show that during the earlier pandemic nurses were seen as essential health workers who were in great demand, but there was little reference to them being heroic. However, with Covid, nurses were often presented in the media as heroes.”
“There are different ways of recognizing ‘courage’ and we should try to expand the definition, particularly in relation to the less publicized work done by women,” Marvasti says. He sees that expansion as positive as it “makes the concept more inclusive. It’s better for our emotional health as a society. It opens the doors for people to be “courageous” in ways that are more about caring for others rather than purely physical acts of bravery.”
“Dr. Marvasti worked mostly on the writing and literature review,” Saylor says. “I focused on data collection and added my views. We worked out the search parameters for what we were looking for, such as ‘COVID,’ or ‘nurse.’ There was a wealth of information.”
A large number of resources means a lot of reading: “I skimmed through over a thousand articles for the Spanish flu and searched for COVID on the ProQuest database, and NewspaperArchive for the Spanish flu,” Saylor continues. “I found those that were relevant for nurses, nurses dealing with pandemics, or some aspect of courage. I uploaded them to OneDrive and categorized according to relevancy. Then I helped with proofreading and editing the paper.”
It has often been noted in the past three years that the two pandemics, 1919 and 2020, have a lot of similarities, but there are also noticeable differences. For example, while across the two pandemics they found “stories of nurses and their struggles,” Marvasti notes, for the 1919 pandemic “we did not find any such stories about male nurses.”
He also cautions about use of the word “courage.” “It’s possible to overdo it with attributions of ‘courage’ or to use accolades of courage as a psychological wage instead of actual compensation for nurses, as some studies have suggested. We need to be more deliberate about how the attribution of courage is used.”
When asked what he liked best about working on this research project Saylor says, “I really like analysis generally and looking at the historical context from different eras. It was fun to do something I hadn’t done before.” But also, as often happens when students participate in research projects, he found that working on this one helped him identify his personal goals. “I don’t think I necessarily want to go into this as a career. There were times I wasn’t thrilled to be looking at long string of articles. I think this helped me narrow down what I like and don’t like about research projects.” Bonus, though: “I didn’t expect to get coauthor credit. That’s super cool.” He recommends fellow students “should look into research, especially if they’re looking at grad school.”
Although President Biden recently announced the end of the COVID public health emergency, the effects of this pandemic will be felt around the world for a long time. After all, Marvasti says, “It is the most significant event of our lives across the globe—and for every cohort, for every population category. In some odd way the pandemic united the world.”
—Therese Boyd, ’79