Guest article by Andrew S. Gallan.
Thank you to Werner for starting this blog series on sharing stories of how research projects originated. This is an important issue for us to share as a community, as it can aid us in recognizing future research opportunities. My narrative is a story of a eureka moment followed by years of persistence.
Prior to earning a doctoral degree at Arizona State University, I worked in industry for Abbott Laboratories in sales, sales management, and marketing. I also was involved in working with not-for-profit health care organizations. During this time, I came to realize that health care was about recovery – the service of helping people recover and heal from interruptions in health. When I entered the doctoral program at ASU, I learned about service research on service failure and recovery. Later in the doctoral program, I was working on my dissertation in collaboration with Mayo Clinic Arizona and was interviewing patients. During data collection, many of the patients talked about recovery and how Mayo Clinic helped them recover from departures of health which had many causes (themselves, others, unknown or unavoidable issues). That was my eureka moment.
I started to think more deeply about how patients recover from illness or injury, and I wondered whether service recovery literature considered and included helping customers recover from failures that occurred outside the service organization. As a result, I thought there might be an opportunity to make a connection between a firm’s responsibility and ability to recover from a self-inflicted service failure and a health care organization’s obligation to help their patients recover from harm inflicted outside of the organization (illness, injury, etc.).
So, my first attempt to conceptualize this issue was to explore literature regarding causal attributions and how they relate to health and health care. At the origin of this project, while I was at DePaul University in Chicago, I was working with a large health care organization, and part of my collaboration with them was with their home health division. I thought exploring this issue with home health patients (people who are visited by various health care professionals in their home, including but not limited to nurses, occupational therapists, rehabilitation specialists, chaplains, and others) would be a perfect context, as these patients were dealing with the repercussions of departures from health with the support and guidance of health care professionals. So, I developed a research protocol in cooperation with the host organization’s leadership team.
Eventually, this research was published in Social Science & Medicine, a stretch goal I had set for myself many years ago based on my respect for the quality of the articles in that publication. While all my publications are my children, this one is a prodigal paper, and holds a special place for me. It has been a ten-year journey. The following timeline shows how this research program progressed.
2014 – Telephone interviews with patients to explore some of the thoughts I had developed.
2014 – Accompanied home health care professionals on patient visits. Documented the clinical care provided and interviewed patients after care was complete.
2016 – Solo author presentation at SERVSIG 2016, which received disparaging feedback from a notable services scholar. At this point, the paper was mostly focused on causal attributions.
2016 – Anu Helkkula and I presented at Summer AMA. Asking Anu to join me on this project was the best decision I made, given her expertise in qualitative research and developing outstanding manuscripts.
2017 – Anu and I presented at Summer AMA and received Best Paper in Track award. We had high hopes for this paper after this!
September 2017 – submitted to Journal of Service Research. Rejected after first round.
December 2018 – Submitted to Journal of Service Management. Rejected after three rounds.
April 2020 – Submitted to Social Science & Medicine. Rejected after one round. The paper was still mostly focused on causal attributions. I then asked FAU colleague in Sociology, William McConnell, to join the paper. We then repositioned its contributions toward Cultural Health Capital (CHC), and less on causal attributions.
August 2023 – Submitted to Sociology of Health and Illness, desk rejected.
October 2023 – New submission with new positioning and data analysis to Social Science & Medicine.
April 2024 – Accepted after two rounds of peer review and one round of editor review.
This is NOT a post about the journals’ review processes or reviewers or editors. I can assure you that all the rejections, while disappointing, were completely warranted based on the reviews and the quality of our manuscripts. This IS a post about believing in your work, your colleagues, and finding a way to bring out the best contributions of your research. It is also a story of taking a eureka moment, developing it into a service research project, and following it through. I am better for it. If you believe that your research project has something important to say, don’t give up on it, or sell it short! The eureka moment holds a special place for a reason – you recognized an idea as interesting and believed that it could fill an important void in service research. That should provide you with the motivation to ensure that your contribution finds the right audience and is archived in a journal.
Thank you to all the reviewers, critics, supporters, and collaborators. This is why the service research community is so special – thank you.
Gallan, Helkkula, & McConnell (2024). “Why Did This Happen to Me? How Discussing Causal Attributions of Departures from Health Can Build Cultural Health Capital”, Social Science & Medicine, 350 (June 2024), 116923.
Andrew S. Gallan
Assistant Professor of Services Marketing,
Florida Atlantic University
