NEW Podcast Episode 18: Silence is Not Always Golden with Dr. Heidi Feldman

AEDR Editorial Team

Aug 17, 2018|AEDR Newsletter

In this newsletter: A new podcast episode, creating an evidence-based emergency dispatch profession, and last call for the writing contest about centers.

Episode 18: Silence is Not Always Golden with Dr. Heidi Feldman

Heidi Kevoe-Feldman, PhD (USA) Associate Professor for the Department of Communications Studies at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

Click here for her recent AEDRpublication on the "Four-Second Rule."

Heidi uses conversation analysis to dig into and understand interactions in settings such as 911 emergency dispatch centers and customer-service call centers. As a conversation analyst, she uses take real calls from these settings and transcribes them. Her transcriptions follow a technical method that analyzes the tasks and goals of the interaction (for example, making requests, giving instruction, and getting information), and identifies patterns by exposing features of talk (for example, question design and ordering of question types) that could have potentially created communication problems.

Her current projects include finding best practices for EMD dispatchers to work with hysterical callers to provide CPR to patients and how negotiators and 911 dispatchers can convince suicidal people to choose life.

BUILDING AN EVIDENCE-BASED PROFESSION.

Emergency dispatchers are no strangers to misunderstandings about what they do. Even the U.S. government classifies emergency dispatchers as "clerks," rather than as the protective service professionals they are. In research on emergency dispatch, we see plenty of misunderstanding as well. Mostly, it comes in the form of narrowed focus. When people talk about emergency dispatch research, they generally mean they're studying one of two things: times or cardiac arrests. The vast majority of emergency dispatch research over the past twenty years has focused on one of these two topics.

Read Isabel Gardett's (PhD, Director of Academics at the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch) Welcome Letter and explore our newest issue of AEDR.