How Poetry Becomes population data:

An Interview with Dr. Taylor Ellis

“Numbers without stories don't sell and stories without numbers don't sell,” says Dr. Taylor Ellis in this interview. A professor of social work, he tells us about his research using poetry as secondary qualitative data, coding emotions in the poems to better understand a vulnerable population. Acknowledging our society that often separates scientific and literary disciplines, Ellis discusses how generating research questions is a creative process and how poetry in particular, an accessible art form needing only a pen and paper, is an incredible source from which to discover the questions we need to be asking. Based on the humanizing population data found in poetry, society might be able to develop more protocols based on empathy.

One tenet that our journal holds is that “Poetry is a form of research,” and your work puts this understanding into practice. How did you become interested in using poetry as a tool for social work research?

I started out in program evaluation for an outpatient based organization that works with youth with problematic sexual behaviors. I have a background in theater—I started out as a theater major in college—and I liken being a program evaluator to being a stagehand: you never see them, but without the stagehands the show doesn't go on. As I was working at the Accountability Based Sex Offender Program (ABSOP): Continuum of Care, my teacher and mentor, Dr. Debra Nelson-Gardell pointed out that the kids at our state secure facility for adolescent males had written and published some poetry chapbooks through the Alabama Writers’ Forum that we might want to look into. Very quickly, I realized that these poetry books could be a source of qualitative, secondary data to help me better understand the population I was working to reach. These books were rich with emotion, and they helped to build a picture connecting the idea of individual traumas to the youth’s behavioral problems. Since poetry is a very natural way to process experiences and the emotions associated with those experiences, I had this lightbulb moment realizing that I could do something with the connection between their words and the understandings we were seeking, and I decided to focus my dissertation on their poetry as a source of secondary research. 

Maybe this realization of poetry’s research potential solidified my line of study in part because of my own personal background with poetry. I'd been writing for many years and it's always been an outlet for me, so this direction allowed me to marry research and my personal passions. I was in a couple of bands in high school (that never really went anywhere!) and I was always the writer and vocalist. I was even a rapper for a little while and through this I came to learn more about rhythm and poetry. Slowly, performing rap naturally transitioned into spoken word poetry and I've since been in a couple of competitions.

Social work operates at multiple levels: the individual and group level, the community level, and the macro policy level, and it's always been very important for me to connect my research to all of them. As I read the poems coded for this project, I found myself writing questions that I wished I could have explored with the writers in a clinical setting. These questions created a foundation to start a conversation with the clients through a non-traditional therapeutic means, and the versatile nature of poetry could also transcend to ask questions at the community level: what larger factors brought the individual here?

Can you explain the process of coding data in the form of poetry into a form that you could analyze?

The focus of the project was to extrapolate emotion that can potentially be lost through trauma and the development of what’s called a callous unemotional trait. But that couldn’t be the whole story, and through poetry, we wanted to ask, how can we look at what emotions the youth are expressing right now? In the chapbook that we coded, there were around twenty poems and we broke them down line by line, ending up with a massive amount of data that we needed a way to organize, allowing us to gain insight into the authors. In my dissertation specifically, I presented a longitudinal study with six different chapbooks. Johnny Saldaña has written an incredible book called The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers—it's on its fifth edition at this point. He has this method of coding called “emotion coding” in which you as the researcher are identifying the emotions of the person you're interviewing, a method which seemed very appropriate to the poetry I was using. I then looked at the poems from the phenomenological perspective, moving the coding into what’s called an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Piecing these methods together, my colleagues and I formed a way of coding poetry that both highlighted the emotions and gave us the freedom to interpret our understanding of it. After developing the method, I used the method to code emotions for the poetry in my dissertation then correlated them to the outcome of various behavioral measures.

The desire to use an interpretive lens comes from the desire to humanize youth with problematic sexual behaviors because of the stigma that's associated with them—they’ve even been referred to as the lepers of the criminal justice system (U.S. House of Representatives, 2007) because nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to go there. By focusing on their emotions and highlighting those emotions, it allows for these issues to be addressed. Through their poetry, I get to see their stories of grief. I get to see their stories of relationships. One of the poems I coded, for example, was about global warming and the effects of it on ocean life. These are the kinds of moments when we’re moving beyond the stigma, we're moving beyond the offense and finding the kid again.

For what's called a second round of coding, we used focus coding to delineate negative versus positive emotions—negative here not meaning bad, but typically more difficult emotions to deal with. For example, typically happiness is a little bit easier to manage than sadness—when we're happy we're not contemplating it, we're not often like why am I happy? But when there's sadness, we're more likely to do that self-assessment: all right, what's going on? Why do I feel sad, what happened? These are the kinds of questions that can be explored through poetry.

In your article, “Poetry authored by vulnerable populations as secondary data: methodological approach and considerations,” you describe how using secondary data inverts traditional research approaches in which a question is asked and data is found to answer it. How did you find questions to ask from the poetry itself?

Dr. Karen Staller, who is a social worker and professor at the University of Michigan as well as the editor of the Journal of Qualitative Social Work, has been phenomenal and integral to this investigative process. In her work, she challenged social work as a profession as well as challenged qualitative researchers to start with data as opposed to a question. The idea is that data is all around us. It exists. So, instead of trying to make data fit into a specific question, what questions can we ask from the data that already exists or what can we learn about populations based on this data? For us, this meant saying look, we've got this chapbook: where can we go from here?

Your article quotes Patricia Leavy, saying that arts and sciences share a goal “to explore, illuminate, and represent aspects of human life and the social and natural worlds of which we are a part.” What is your understanding of the overlap between the disciplines?

We have lived in a society that believes that arts and sciences cannot coexist. You’re either a full-time artist or you’re committed to STEM, at most with an art hobby on the side. That's the setup that people think makes money. But in social work, what we've started to explore is this idea of a professional use of self. Though we’re seeing it start to transcend into other fields as well, the idea emerged from social work as this question of how can you use your personal interest to leverage for the benefit of your clients? In my research, I was able to dive deeper into the numbers because I had the poetry. So I think not only can the disciplines coexist, but they can actually benefit each other and form a greater understanding of human life.

I had someone tell me one time that numbers without stories don't sell and stories without numbers don't sell. Unfortunately, we've seen a lot of funding cut for the arts so we're having to have communities fund these projects. But what these cuts do is send a message about what we value in our society. Then right now, because of the pandemic, we're starting to see the necessity of arts in our society—what have people done now that they have free time? They’ve started to bake, they’ve started to paint, they’ve started to write, they’ve started to take on music projects that had been sitting on a shelf—in all these ways we’ve engaged with the arts to help cope with what is going on around us. One of the reasons I think this separation has existed is because we have believed that the arts or their effect are not measurable. Like one of my favorite poets, Jason “Propaganda” Petty, said, “you can't measure the love in my daughter's eyes.” And it’s true, there's never going to be a measure that allows me to see that. But maybe we can get something close to it and maybe we can at least find a measure to talk about these feelings. Science is inherently creative—generating research questions is a creative process.

Can you tell us more about how you see possibility in poetic inquiry to enhance the understanding of and empathy for people?

One of the things I loved exploring with my dissertation is how through the poetry chapbooks, the youth from the secure facilities were given a resource in their toolbox—when they leave the facility, writing poetry will be something they can still do, that they can easily take with them.

It's so cool because you're also challenging the concept of a singular identity by making them published poets: regardless of their offense status, their poems are forever printed in those books and I think it’s really powerful to give them something that challenges the labels that society tries to place on them. Additionally, engaging with the poetry helps challenge our own perceptions. As one of my co-authors said during the first project we worked on, “I can no longer see these kids as their offense.”

I also had a friend who started a nonprofit called Inspired Arts for which I taught a poetry class. It's a free arts camp that’s open to all kids from lower income backgrounds. When I got in there that first day to teach poetry, I realized I had to do something different to show that poetry wasn’t just high-brow meters and complicated forms. So instead, I started with “I Am” poems and it was amazing to see how they responded, coming up with new associations and metaphors about their identities. As kids, it's not that they can't get to that sophisticated place, but you can't start there—you’ve got to find a point from which to build their love and desire to make connections and understand their identities through poetry.

We were struck by Rich Furman’s idea of poetry as an “emotional microchip” which your article quoted. How do you understand this term in relation to research?

Poetry allows insight into the most personal and difficult experience as well as the emotions associated with those experiences. This idea rings so true in relation to my own writing.

Three years ago, my father passed away within six days of my first daughter’s birth and it was such a difficult time. There are pieces of that that I have no recollection of, just these emotional highs and depths within minutes. I would in the hospital with my daughter, looking at her with joy and also realizing that my dad was never going to meet her. In that time, I wrote—it was writing out of necessity because I didn't have the language. Now, those poems serve as a capsule for me of those emotions, a repository for those experiences. Metaphor allows us enough separation from the page to process through pain. It's the experiences and the emotions associated with those experiences where the motivation for writing comes from, and so thinking about the poem as a microchip means it’s both where emotions can be both stored and let out.

What do you see as the future of using poetic inquiry in research endeavors?

I think that we're going to start seeing a major shift in the academy. Though the marriage of arts and research has been expanding for a long time, at first I thought I was carving my own path, that I was having to go on this journey alone. But the further I delved into this hybrid work, the more I realized that there were a lot of people taking similar steps to combine the disciplines.

So I’ve see a lot of growth, and I see more to come in the future. I'm a part of a group that's writing a book on social work and the arts, and it is showing the potential of this combination and others like it. Of course, you're also now seeing more researchers required to secure funding for grants, you're seeing higher publication requirements. Because of these obstacles, it'll take a little while before the arts can become more fully immersed into the research process and be viewed as a respectable path.

For poetic inquiry specifically, I think that it may struggle more than other art forms to gain traction in the research field. I think that you're going to see a lot of work in film or music, but in areas like poetry and painting it may be more difficult to gain funding. That said, I’ve achieved this work without funding, and I'm going to keep doing it because I love it. Because of that, I don't think poetic inquiry is going away because the people that are doing it are doing it because they love poetry and are now demonstrating its potential. Whether you're looking at creating poetry from qualitative data or whether you're using poetry as the data itself, there is so much versatility and opportunity that still needs to be explored. Poetry can be a part of every step of the research process, from question generation all the way to analysis. You're seeing photo voice becoming more respected as a form of inquiry and so there may be specific types of poetic inquiry that also emerge as respectable across disciplines.

One of the things that separates poetry from the other arts is how accessible it is. You need a pen and paper, you need a memo on your phone, you need to type out on a Word document—I don't need art supplies, I don't have to have a canvas. I don't have to have this program on my computer for editing, I don't have to have a microphone. We can get out and process those feelings in their most immediate moment, and those raw feelings now become a record.

I think this accessibility is what makes poetry so incredible, for research and for us on a personal level, and it’s why we need to be reminded that this resource exists for us to tap into even more.