Journalism Professor Advocates Math as A Useful Writer's Tool
Cathy Bullock of Journalism and Communication spoke at a recent Inaugural Lecture recognizing her advancement to full professor. From left, USU First Gentleman John Cockett, Bullock, USU Interim Provost Larry Smith and Joseph Ward, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
As a wordsmith, Cathy Bullock has no problem with numbers.
That’s unlike many of the young students in her research methods class who initially steered toward the Department of Journalism and Communication because, Bullock said, “they don’t think they’re good at math, don’t want to do math and figured this major wouldn’t require math.”
Over the years, however, this journalism professor has found that math actually helps her written words more accurately create the image she’s after.
This realization was one of the “aha moments” Bullock described as a speaker for Utah State University’s Inaugural Lecture Professor Series. The reoccurring lectures, hosted at the USU president’s home, celebrate and acknowledge a faculty member’s advancement to full professor.
Life’s “epiphanies,” Bullock told the audience of friends, family and colleagues, may seem small and insignificant at the time, like some instances during rehearsals for the Westminster Bell Choir at Logan’s First Presbyterian Church. There are those times, said Bullock, who directs the English handball choir, when “the music comes together in a new, wonderful way.”
As a researcher and professor, these same small “aha” moments “give me a nudge forward,” she said.
A prime example, she said, is that old nemesis, math. Even as a first-grader, her relationship with arithmetic was one of love-hate. “I had no patience for addition and subtraction,” she remembers, although those early tests revealed she was actually good at it.
Her “aha” moment came as she entered the doctoral program at the University of Washington’s School of Communication. Already established as a writer and photographer for agricultural magazines, she was required to deviate from her writing classes to take a course in statistics.
“My first epiphany was how well one can do in a statistics course when driven by sheer terror,” she laughed. Soon after, she said, that light bulb triggered again with “the realization that I could learn math and stats — and enjoy myself.” (It also has helped her relate, she adds, to her “math-phobic” students.)
Yet another “aha” took place when she settled down to actual research and found that few of her fellow graduate students could crunch statistical numbers. “I had worried that being the frumpy, middle-aged grad student who might not be able to keep up with her younger, brighter colleagues,” she said. “All of a sudden, I was the superhero, the statistics star.”
(It’s because of this experience that she now advises her students: “If you know how to do something others don’t, you will always be in demand.”)
Bullock continues to use her numerical expertise in her research in JCOM — where she also is known, according to colleague Candi Carter Olson, as “the department aunt.”
Her continuing field of research has been intimate-partner violence and how it’s portrayed in the media. In a number of studies, she found many instances of fatal domestic violence were only reported immediately afterward, “emphasizing the who, what, where, when, and how but not the why.”
Media coverage generally tended not to label the incidents as domestic violence or abuse — indeed, “anything that might tell us what it was,” she said. The coverage relied heavily on official police sources that made it difficult to “put a human face on the crime,” and also omitted “any broader personal context, such as the couple’s history, which could have helped readers understand the patterns often present with intimate-partner violence.”
And most important to her research, the media “generally presented each case (as) an isolated incident rather than part of a larger social issue.”
Content analyses are useful, but Bullock said she wanted involvement beyond that. She joined the board of CAPSA (Citizens Against Physical and Sexual Abuse) and has since served on the executive board of the Utah Domestic Violence Council. She’s shared her findings in newsrooms and journalism classrooms with a seminar called “Domestic Violence 101”.
Right now, Bullock is paper-reams-deep into a project with Stephen Reiher, assistant professor of public relations in JCOM. She’s researching Utahns’ attitudes about rape awareness, prevention and education for use by the Men’s Anti-violence Network of Utah — MAN for short. Her research, to be shared with legislators and other groups, will help shape MAN’s rape-prevention efforts.
Her years of teaching have sparked other “aha moments”. For instance, she believes that knowledge is indeed its own reward, then adds, “But it’s even better when there are M&Ms to go along with it.”
Or this epiphany, which came while she was watching “The Big Bang Theory.” She realized she absolutely has to become an extra for the scientifically comic sitcom, perhaps as “one of the geeky professors sitting at a table in the campus cafeteria.”
Related links: http://journalism.usu.edu/
Writer and contact: Janelle Hyatt, Janelle.hyatt@usu.edu, 435-797-0289
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