The Empathetic Librarian: Rural Librarians as a Source of Support for Rural Cyberbullied Young Adults

Cyberbullying is a problem many young adults ages 12 to 18 have experienced on a daily basis. Adult support is critical in both the prevention and intervention of cyberbullying. Although parents, teachers, and school administrators have been highlighted as sources of support for cyberbullied young adults, librarians have not been studied as a source of support although school and public librarians engage with teens on a daily basis. Through empathetic services, i.e., activities carried out in everyday in which librarians provide social, emotional, and psychological support, librarians can help young adults who are experiencing and/or witnessing cyberbullying. Empathy in the library has been infrequently researched within LIS. When empathy has been studied, it is often under different labels, such as pastoral care or customer service. The purpose of this research was to investigate how rural school and public librarians can be a source of support for rural cyberbullied young adults. The study was guided by four research questions in which I explored the types of support rural young adults desired and received from rural librarians as well as the types of support rural librarians perceived they offered and would like to offer. In this project, I used two qualitative methods: semi-structured interviews and structured video autoethnography. The fourteen participants in this project included three school librarians, four public librarians, and seven young adults. The participants were all residents of rural Southwest Georgia. In this project, I focused on rural young adults and rural librarians within this region. In an attempt to be a more reflexive researcher, I also maintained a personal written autoethnography to reflect on my research process. In my analysis, I found that while rural young adults often saw rural librarians as sources for information, mentorship, and everyday help, they also saw potential for librarians to engage in advocacy and empathy while in the library. In many interviews and video entries, the rural librarian participants frequently highlighted their significant role in information provision and instruction for rural young adults. While a few librarians acknowledged that they provided social, emotional, and psychological support for their young patrons, librarian participants typically downplayed the importance of this role in their work. However, librarians revealed a desire to not only improve their role as providers of information and instruction but also to increase the social, emotional, and psychological support they provided in their libraries. Since this is an exploratory project, I suggested that empathy in the library is a little researched area in LIS and often overlooked by librarians in the field. Additional research is needed in the important role of empathetic services in librarianship. This research fills a gap in the literature about rural librarians as a source of support for rural cyberbullied young adults and introduces the term "empathetic services". I also proposed that future research is needed into relational communication theory as a framework for empathetic services. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]