When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans Jerry Gale was ready. No, the associate professor of marriage and family therapy wasn’t anywhere near the coast, but he and a team of University of Georgia faculty and representatives of the Athens-Clarke County mental health community had been meeting on a monthly basis for close to five years preparing for a possible widespread crisis.

“After the Sept. 11 bombings I was visiting with the other members of the Clinical Program Directors Group,” said Gale, who has headed the MFT doctoral program in the Department of Human Development and Family Science for the past decade and has been part of the MFT faculty for 16 years. “We realized that if anything like that happened here, we weren’t ready.”

The faculty members contacted other therapists in the community, as well as representatives of the school district, police department and other organizations and formed the UGA/Athens Crisis Response Team. During their monthly meetings, the group discussed how best to respond to a community crisis, including developing an incident command structure that included a telephone tree and maintaining a 24-hour beeper system.
The benefit of these monthly meetings became evident after the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast and it became clear that massive evacuations were going to occur.

“Between 25 and 30 of us met the Friday after Katrina hit the coast at the Ramsey Student Center, which had been designated as a possible evacuation site,” Gale said. “At first, I thought Ramsey would be the logical location because this is where all of our resources are, but when we saw it, we realized it would be very difficult living quarters for those being evacuated.”

Instead, the Rock Eagle 4-H Center was designated to handle the 600 evacuees and soon Gale and other members of the team headed to Eatonton. During the course of the next three weeks, more than 95 volunteers, including several Human Development and Family Science faculty members and graduate students, worked with Gale and the other team members to both counsel evacuees and assess their mental and physical well being.

“These people had lost everything and they had seen horrific things,” he said. “It was also a special needs population. There were elderly people as well as families with young children. There were also those with additional mental health needs. Many had medical needs, but didn’t have any prescriptions with them. Our goal was to help with assessments and to be a calming presence.”

Although Gale spent much of that first weekend on-site, the remainder of the time he spent in Athens, scheduling volunteers and gathering reports.

“Because of security issues, we had to determine who was going to Rock Eagle and when and make sure the on-site security had their names so they would be admitted,” he recalled. “But also important was the debriefing I did with the incident commanders each day. I was really taking in everyone’s poison, listening to their frustrations and calming them down.”

After the evacuees were all relocated Gale and the other members of the response team knew their work wasn’t finished.

“A big problem through all of this was caring for ourselves,” he said. “About eight of us met with someone from Green Cross for a debriefing a couple of weeks after Rock Eagle was closed, but that was just a beginning.”

The Green Cross was founded by Charles Figley, a professor of social work and the director of Florida State University’s Traumatology Institute, and has the goal of using research, education and professional development to help those who have been traumatized. It just so happened that Gale had also contracted with the Figleys to keynote the annual Marriage and Family Therapy Institute meeting in January.

“We had contracted with the Figleys to present a day-long seminar on compassion fatigue 13 months ago, but after what we all went through working with the evacuees at Rock Eagle, I began looking for funding to allow them to do an additional talk for the volunteers,” Gale explained.

With funding from UGA President Michael Adams’ Venture Fund, Gale sponsored a Saturday-morning event for the Rock Eagle volunteers and their families. The event began with a reception to

thank the volunteers, which included leaders from the university, local and state government. The Figleys then led an hour-and-a-half meeting focusing on what the volunteers had gone through and providing them tips on how to work through the on-going emotions they experienced.

For Gale, completing the work with Hurricane Katrina evacuees and volunteers marks a beginning of a different sort – using the experience for qualitative research projects.
He already has written a paper focusing on the challenges of creating a community crisis response team and is considering future projects as well.
Gale’s interest in qualitative research dates back to graduate school, but his desire to be a therapist can be traced back to his childhood.

“I had a speech impediment as a child and went through several years of speech therapy,” he said. “In fact, I can remember thinking as a child that I was unhappy and that when I became an adult I wanted to help other people who were unhappy.”
After earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, Gale spent a number of years honing his skills as a family therapist, including earning his master’s degree in counseling and guidance. In 1986 he began his doctoral studies at Texas Tech and chose to analyze a single couple’s counseling session.

“My dissertation research was conversation analysis at the micro level,” he said. “It was looking at what we say and how we say it because it’s through the performance of language that we create meaning. In my dissertation, I focused on the performance of talk in therapy and how it accomplished therapeutic change.”

When Gale arrived at the University of Georgia in 1989 as an assistant professor he was pleasantly surprised to find that there were other qualitative researchers and, in fact, the Qualitative Interest Group was already established. Throughout his academic career Gale has continued to focus on qualitative research, although not always on discourse analysis.

“I don’t always focus on the micro features of talk and turn-taking, but my experience doing discourse analysis impacts me in many ways,” he explained. “My experiences help me appreciate social interactions in subtle ways from a cultural critical perspective.”
Through the years, Gale has explored a variety of topics, including such disparate subjects as attachment and adoption (his daughter is from China) and improvisational theater, an interest he developed several years ago as a way of escaping the “publish or perish” mindset of academia.

“With my research on adoption, I am looking at how the stories and narratives we tell shape the meanings we attribute to our experience,” he said. “With the work on improvisation, there was a focus on how the actors communicate in ways that build trust, validating the others’ reality as it changes moment to moment, attending to subtle communication cues while keeping one’s concentration in the present moment.”

Gale’s research has been recognized by the American Family Therapists Academy and he’ll be awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research at this year’s national conference.

In recommending him, the awards committee said Gale “has not only made outstanding contributions to qualitative research, but … is a noted teacher and advocate in this area. He has consistently drawn attention in his research to the importance of context in understanding family and social phenomena.”

During the 10 years Gale has headed the MFT doctoral program he has seen more than 30 students complete the program, which is ranked among the top three nationally. Those students have taken a number of positions with many in academic settings. In the past two years the program has expanded to include post-baccalaureates. These students will earn both their master’s degree and doctorate while enrolled in the program.

As he works with graduate students, teaching them the intricacies of research and helping them enhance their therapeutic skills, Gale has one bit of advice:

“Find balance in your personal and professional life, and maintain moral accountability in your actions. I guess that’s two,” he said, chuckling. “But then that’s why I do qualitative research.”