Senior Honors College Fellow Abigail Bordelon
Author: Abigail Bordelon | Majors: Public Health, Spanish | Semester: Fall 2024
Blurb. Hello! My name is Abigail Bordelon and I am a senior in both the College of Education and Health Professions and Fulbright. I am majoring in Public Health and Spanish with a minor in Global Studies. Dr. Bart Hammig from the Health, Human Performance, and Recreation Department is serving as my research mentor. This semester, Fall 2024, is my first semester receiving the Honors College Research Grant.
Blog: During my sophomore year, I was introduced to who would eventually become my research mentor, Dr. Bart Hammig. One of his current masters students, Sydney Haldeman, introduced us after I told her about my interest in gun violence prevention research. From there I went on to assist Dr. Hammig with a study examining media reports of unintentional pediatric firearm deaths for prevention messaging. Prevention messaging is common in the field of public health as a tool to help the general public take steps to avoid tragedies. I worked alongside Dr. Hammig and a masters student to analyze around 300 media reports from 2021-2022 that pertained to an unintentional firearm death of a minor zero to eleven years of age. What we found became the inspiration for my Honors Thesis: the overwhelming majority of these reports did not include a prevention message.
Upon this discovery I instantly began to think about how to correct for this deficiency. Working to reduce gun violence of any kind will always be a conglomerated approach, but one aspect must be public education. I quickly learned that media toolkits are often used to help guide journalists when reporting on sensitive issues such as suicides, mass shootings, SIDS, and other tragedies. I decided that when it was time to embark on my Honors Thesis I would craft a media toolkit with the aim of instructing journalists on how to include prevention messaging in articles on the unintentional firearm deaths of minors. While I initially anticipated this to be a straightforward endeavor, I have learned this semester that it is anything but.
My difficulties can best be distilled into two main categories: lack of available literature and the complexities of informational interviewing. When I began gathering sources for my annotated bibliography and literature review, I was met with a sparse pool to pull from. The 1997 Dickey Amendment, authored by Arkansas Representative Jay Dickey, and other restrictions to gun violence research has resulted in a truncated body of research that is decades behind other fields. This being said I had great difficulties in finding the sources I needed for much of the semester which greatly limited my progress.
My other major obstacle was the informational interviews I had planned to conduct with current journalists. The original idea was to conduct these interviews to see what journalists know about prevention messaging, their attitudes towards including it in their reports, and what they would find helpful in a media toolkit. Dr. Hammig and I started on the IRB process and crafted some of the interview questions before I met with my other committee member, Dr. Corrigan. I chose Dr. Corrigan as a member of my committee because I believed she would be able to help guide my project in aspects of communication and journalism that are outside of mine and Dr. Hammig’s fields of study. I could not have been more right. During my meeting late in the semester with Dr. Corrigan, she explained to me why including informational interviews would not only be an unnecessary step in my work but would also be unlikely to yield useful information. She explained to me how many of my questions would be “priming” the journalists to provide certain answers, how my questions would likely split into endless branches of other questions, and other difficulties I would likely face. She also explained that many journalists do not see themselves as advocates and would not necessarily consider including prevention messaging in their pieces. She further counseled me that I already knew from my prior research project that journalists across the country are not including prevention messages in these types of death and that informational interviews would not provide me with novel information integral to my thesis. Dr. Corrigan also directed me to sources that myself and Dr. Hammig had not found on the research databases most common to the public health discipline.
Ultimately, I did not make as much progress as I had hoped to this semester, but did mature in my skills as a researcher and learned many lessons that I will remember moving forward. I am now acutely aware when conducting a project that is strongly multidisciplinary, it would best serve me to seek counsel from the other disciplines as early in the process as possible. In the upcoming semester, I will be working increasingly alongside Dr. Corrigan as well as my regular thesis meetings with Dr. Hammig. I feel confident in my plan moving forward and feel equipped to navigate the unexpected ambiguities this project entails.
The Honors College Research Grant allowed me to study a topic that is relatively untouched and that I believe has potential to contribute to saving the lives of children. I am grateful for the flexibility it has granted me to grow as a researcher as well as to learn from my mistakes. I am proud of what I have learned thus far and excited to develop a comprehensive media toolkit next semester.