Putting on a Professional Face: Understanding the Emotion Management Experiences of Graduate Assistants

• In Event: 435 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Higher Education: Beyond the BA

Abstract

There has been little research done that addresses the socio-emotional experiences of individuals who are graduate assistants. In working to fill this gap in the literature, this project explores the experiences of graduate assistants as they manage their emotions in order to carry out their job responsibilities. To understand this phenomena, 18 in-depth interviews were conducted with graduate assistants from a southern university. After utilizing analytic description, three representative themes were pulled from the data. These themes show that graduate assistants utilize purposive smiles when providing academic services to students, engage in various forms of emotion acting (deep, surface, and transformative) as a means of managing emotions, and work to construct professional interactions with faculty.

Author

• Dajuan Ferrell, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee