Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella, and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach. Sandra Ball-Rokeach is Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her 52-year career began as a sociologist receiving her Ph.D. in 1968 from the University of Washington. Sandra’s research on communication phenomena drew her into the communication field in 1986. Sandra is best known for media system dependency theory, communication infrastructure theory, and the 21-year-Metamorphosis project in which more than 150 students were trained in multi-level and multi-method research. She is an ICA Fellow and has served in a number of capacities for the ICA. Today, Sandra is in conversation with Barbara Osborn. When this interview was recorded, Barbara was the Director of Communications for the Office of L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl. She is a former collaborator with Sandra on a course at the University of Southern California called “Research, Practice & Social Change” for over a decade. Here is Barbara.
Sandra, it's fabulous to be able to sit down with you like this.
It's wonderful to sit down with you, Barbara.
It makes me very happy to see you recognized in this way. I wanted to start this morning with your early training. What were the things going on in the world that were shaping your choices about where you would put your scholarly energies?
Well, there was a lot going on, of course, in the 1960s period with the Vietnamese War, the civil rights movement, and so on. But what was interesting is that the second wave of feminism had not developed until past my graduate school days. When I entered graduate school at the University of Washington, I really got the first taste of sexism that would endanger my career pursuit. Because I didn't have the money to pay for graduate school, I needed a fellowship. I had been guaranteed one by my professors. They said I was just a shoo-in. But when the list came out of NIMH training fellows, it was all male. So I raised a ruckus. I really was so angry. Finally, they let me in. I think one of the males dropped out. So I was the only female fellow.
It seems to me that a theme that I expect to emerge is raising a ruckus. Clearly, as a young woman, you have that rocket-making capacity in you. Where’d it come from and what was fueling it?
During my childhood, I had actually become a sociologist before I knew it because I was an insider-outsider. So I was always observing things at the same time that I was participating in them. I was analyzing what's going on here, for example, my early recognition of racism in the classroom. Also my father's statement that I would make a good secretary and a sweet little wife of maybe a minister. He just could not see me. My mother was the one who really supported me in my pursuits. She had a lot of gumption. That really helped me.
I'm interested in why you chose sociology. Do you think it's, because of that insider-outsider perspective, or were there other reasons contributing to your interest in sociology?
I avoided any female-dominant professions like nursing or education. I thought about medical school, but then I thought, “No, I want a family life.” Sociology really grabbed me because it seemed to fit with the multi-level way that I see the world–not just the psychology of what's happening, but also the structure underlying all of those activities. I became cognizant of how the world at a societal level was putting up barriers and structures that made some people make it and other people not make it. I saw class differences in how people were treated. I saw ethnic and racial differences. I saw gender differences. One of the stories from my high school was a close friend of mine became pregnant, and I couldn't figure out why she was called a whore. It seemed to me that the pimply young men who engage in intercourse are not in any way stigmatized, but women are. It was tragic, actually, for this young woman. So I had many experiences that I processed in a sociological way.
It makes me so sad to think about you having a pregnant friend way back when, and how much I would like that story to seem very distant and irrelevant in this moment. And clearly, it does not. In your 20s as a sociologist, you decided to go to the University of Washington. Give me a sense of why UW seemed like the right place to go.
My undergraduate professors encouraged me to go and three of them had gotten their PhDs from UW. So they really tried to help me connect with some of the professors there. I transferred my senior year of undergraduate to UW. I really liked the program. It was such a shock when I didn't get a fellowship, but I ended up getting one.
So, you're a newly minted PhD out of the University of Washington. You get this surreal opportunity to sit on the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence and served as the co-director of the task force on media and violence. You're, what, 26 at this point? Are there any other women on the commission?
No. On the commission staff, there was a staff of 50 people, no women except me. And on the commission itself–the commissioners–no women. You had very powerful lawyers on the staff that were well-positioned inside government. Milton Eisenhower was wonderful. He was the first one to bring in both a social scientist and a lawyer as co-directors of a task force. So I thought, “Oh, boy, we're equals!” but we're not. I have an irreverent nature, so I'm not blown over by people with high prestige and high status and high power. Therefore, I think I was able to work a path for myself to understand what was going on and how I could participate in a way that satisfied me.
What political intervention did you see while on the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence?
Yes, it was an interesting experience because right off the bat, Drew Pearson, a very famous columnist at the time, called me a foreigner. How could I understand US media because I was born in Canada? He said that I was brought into whitewash the role of the Johnsons in their media ownership, because at that time, Lyndon Johnson was president, and he and his wife owned media properties. So I started to get indirect pressure brought through the lawyer hierarchy that the White House was concerned about what we're doing. I got more and more irritated by this. My lawyer co-director had told me that the phones are bugged. So I thought I would use the phone to fight back. I called up Al Bandura. Very famous media effects fellow and social cognitive theory. He's amazing. I knew him from before. So I chatted, and then I said, “Guess what Al? I'm getting Whitehouse pressure to rig the taskforce report. And if I get more pressure, I'm gonna hold a press conference.” He said, “Go for it!” It does not take very long to have proof that the phones were bugged because it came down the chain through my co-director lawyer, because the lawyers were really more powerful. They said, “Oh, guess what? You're gonna go over to the executive office buildings and have a meeting with Joseph Califano,” who was chief of staff for President Johnson. I thought, “Oh, boy, it worked.” So we trekked over there, went into the West Wing, and met with Mr. Califano. He didn't even take a breath before he said, “Don't worry, there was no interference from the White House in your task force report. You do what you want to do.” And he was looking at me. So it worked. I learned very quickly that you had to use communication devices to fight back.
Yes, indeed. Let's talk about the conclusions of that report. How do you feel about where the report landed?
Well, the report ended up saying that (consistent with Bandura, Berkowitz, and others) under certain conditions, the media will have effects of increasing aggression, particularly in children. But it was very limited and not necessarily long-term. I was just dissatisfied with that conclusion because I was seeing the media having a tremendous role. We were right next to Lafayette Park, which is across from the White House, and we could see all the demonstrations against the war. It was kind of like, wait a minute, we're living in two different worlds: the media have no effect, and look what's happening outside. I began to feel that the psychological level of analysis was insufficient to capture media effects. I came away very dissatisfied with our conclusion. It affected my later career. It really led to the development of media system dependency theory, which is a multi-level theory. You had to really bring in the role of the media in society itself: multi-level. Look at the macro. Look at the meso. It could be interpersonal, and the micro is fine. You shouldn't ignore it, but you need to put the micro, the psychological level, in context of the larger forces that are operating to really end up understanding what effect the media is having with regard to violence.
I want to talk a little bit about the resistance among communication scholars to use that multi-level analysis. And I think it was when you were at Washington State that Melvin Defleur asked you to co-author Theories of Mass Communication. I believe it was there that you began to articulate this sort of multi-level approach. For me, as a young scholar, I thought it was both daunting and helpful. Helpful, in as much as there was a cognitive dissonance. It's like, the media effects can't be as rarefied as this interpersonal stuff is suggesting, and at the same time, to do multi-level is daunting from a methodological standpoint. I just wonder if my response to it was common at the time that you began to articulate it.
Oh, yes. It was very interesting. Steven Chaffee, a very well-regarded communication scholar was editing communication research at the time that I submitted my first piece on media system dependency. It's the only piece I've ever submitted that I didn't have to revise. Steve always kind of understood what I was trying to do, but a lot of other people had the same reaction as you. That's all well and good, but it's kind of airy-fairy because you can't really do research multi-level. It's a lot of labor. If you're going up for tenure, you have to get articles out, boom, boom, boom, which is kind of a killer of the motivation to do ecological research. Once you start in that path, you kind of get locked into it, which I think stultifies a lot of young professionals in a cubby hole, where they succeed in one network, and therefore they keep in that network and never move out of it. So a lot of people said, this is just like uses and gratification. So I had to write a piece combating that idea. That was published in Mass Communication, research journal. I actually ended up debating with Elihu Katz, who's one of the founders of uses and gratifications and a lovely friend of mine. I had a Fulbright fellowship to Hebrew University, specifically to challenge him on the extent to which uses and gratifications could really handle what I was trying to get at. He very graciously ended up still disagreeing with me, but we remained very good friends.
So Sandra at USC, you begin to articulate a theory of communication infrastructure. So break it down for us, what's communication infrastructure theory? What are the components?
I started to realize that people study economic infrastructures and political infrastructures. But they're not really looking at what I think is probably the most important infrastructure. And that's the communication infrastructure, which, in my lingo, consists of a storytelling network. I learned from rhetoricians like Walter Fisher, the importance of narrative, the importance of storytelling. Look at the way that previous communication researchers identified factor by factor, that it plays a part like in civic engagement. But they haven't looked at the dynamic that ties those parts together. That, I think, is storytelling. The three storytellers are the residents in their interpersonal networks, the local media, and community-building organizations. If there's a conversation going on, between those three storytellers, you've got a vibrant storytelling network. However, that network is also set in the context of its own environment, its place, and we call that the communication action context. So the communication action context has all kinds of considerations. For example, if you don't have safe streets, you're not going to be out walking. If you don't have safe parks, you are not going to congregate and meet with your fellow residents and talk. If you don't have jobs in the area, you're going to be spending a lot of time in Los Angeles, driving out of your area. So you don't have time to participate in your community. So the work conditions, the conditions of safety and security, transportation is very very important because that context either enables storytelling between those three storytellers or it hinders it. So you have to take into account the interaction of the storytelling network, residents, local media, community orgs, and their conversation in context of the environment in which they operate. It's an interaction effect between those two components.
I want to remind folks who are listening that you and I taught a course for a dozen or so years, and I approached the work of the course coming out of community organizing, and you came from communication scholarship. I had an epiphany one day, when you and I were talking about this because communications infrastructure theory is what I call community organizing. How do the residents in a community become informed? How do they organize? And how do they develop a sense of self-efficacy?
I should have credited, as I do in my writing, community organizers. Because we entered the field, we didn't go in with a preformed theory. Communication infrastructure theory came out of several years of being in the community and listening and observing. Who we were listening to the most, that seemed to resonate the most with my head, were the community organizers. They informed us on how they go about storytelling and passing the story along and having that lead to mobilization. It's just wonderful. If you want to understand the community and communication infrastructure theory, go talk to community organizers. They're the ones from whom I learned the most from our grounded inquiry into these communities.
At USC, you were able to incarnate this theory in at least two projects. One was the Metamorphosis project. What was the Metamorphosis project and how did it evolve over the years?
It became a 21-year graduate training program. It was absolutely wonderful. One of the reasons I wanted to go to Annenberg was the quality of the graduate students. We first of all tried to tackle civic engagement. So we ended up being multi-method. And by multi-method, I mean surveys, focus groups, content analysis, interviews–all kinds of methods in 11 major communities in Los Angeles County. What we wanted to understand was, how can we assess the strength of the indigenous communication infrastructure in those 11 communities, and what difference it makes for civic engagement? Does a strong storytelling network and a good communication action context provide higher levels of civic engagement? And in fact, yes, that was the case. And we've repeatedly found that. So storytelling is a very powerful force.
It sounds like the findings that you took from the Metamorphosis project then led to the development of the Alhambra Source.
Yes, because one of the things we found in trying to understand civic engagement was that communities without local media had lower levels of civic engagement. That made sense to us from the communication infrastructure approach. You're missing one of the three critical storytellers: local media is gone. So now, you only have maybe some community building organizations, and maybe you have residents talking to one another. But you don't have the local media to precipitate conversations around issues. So Michael Parks, the former editor of the LA Times, approached me and said, “Sandra, I like your communication infrastructure theory. How about we get together and start a local media? I've picked out a community, Alhambra, because it's a workable size and ethnically diverse. All of the challenges are there because there are very low levels of civic engagement. Maybe, if we create a local media venue, we can raise levels of civic engagement.” Here was putting theory into practice big time. The Alhambra Source lasted 11 or 12 years. It ended in November of 2020. But we have absolutely discernible effects on that community. It gave rise to community organizations that were seeking change in Alhambra. It put the power elite on the defensive, and they would attack us. They've not been used to the transparency that we were providing. It really had effects that you could observe, like the composition of the city council changed dramatically. We often worked in coalition, like with the Alhambra Latino Association with the Hemel Hempstead Teachers Association, and so on, to put on events. We weren't just a journalism venue. We were active community members as well. I feel so privileged to have had Michael Parks as a partner and who recently passed. I talked to several members of the community that were on our advisory board, and I asked, “Did you think that the effects of Alhambra Source have lasted? And they said, “Oh, big time.”
I'm interested in where you see opportunity now in communication scholarship. What work is being done now that you think is meaningful and exciting? And where would you like to see more focus and funding?
I'm excited by people that are trying to look at communication ecologies, and not just look at siloed communication. For example, Viswanath in the public health arena, is doing extremely good work. I'm excited by people trying to do multi-level research. Pan and McLeod, decades ago, argued for multi-level analysis. So I'm excited by people also that are trying to understand what's going on and the role of communication in the increasing authoritarianism of our society. I think we've got to try and face that. What is happening? How do we understand the role of communication, and everyone points to social media? It's not just social media. We have to really tackle the nasty problem of what role our communication field should be playing in understanding the move towards totalitarianism in this country. And the increased racism, the increased misogyny. These big issues are complex. They require multi-level ecological analysis. There are some universities that are investing in community-type research. The University of Washington has hired Carmen Gonzalez, one of my students, for this purpose. Fordham hired Garrett Broad for this purpose.
I'm interested in what you would identify as the contributions that you've made that you would hope would be most enduring.
The first one is my 150 students that went through the Metamorphosis project as graduate students that I'm so proud of. I keep in touch with many of them. I'm most proud of my mentoring. And I did receive several mentoring awards, and that was very meaningful to me. Because in the long run, I'm gonna die one of these days. So what is your legacy? Your legacy is really the students that you worked with, to develop research and develop theory with–not as inferior. They were equals to you in the team effort. You really allow the student to become a creator of ideas, not just an adopter of ideas.
I think that says volumes about your contribution to the field–that the first and only thing you put on the list is your students. Is there anything that you'd hope to share that we haven't touched on?
Yes, one thing that I would love to see communication scholars address is self censorship. My own husband during the McCarthy era, which was really scary for academics pulled Marx and Engels off his bookshelf. If my husband would do it, then how many other scholars would do it? Because he wasn't that kind of guy. I'm very worried that academic scholars in the classroom will begin to self censor, because they're going to be challenged by people that hold in this case, a position according to Trump. If that happens, it's disturbing and you don't know what to do with it, and then you'll begin to self censor. I think we need to start studying the role of academe in social change. To what extent are we going to stop talking about our beliefs and start pulling the books off the bookshelf? Sociological work is pretty challenging to the social structure. So just doing your work the way you do it, you don't have to express your political views, just do your analysis.
And that's a great place to end.
Okay. Thank you, Barbara.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This episode was produced by Dominic Bonelli. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.
