Chapter 8: Understanding the Lived Experience Of Women’s Health and Well-Being at Work

Since earning my PhD in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Akron in 2013 and earning tenure at the University of Arizona in 2018, my research agenda and focus has taken what may be viewed by some as a dramatic twist. If you asked the 2013 freshly minted PhD version of me what my research interests were, I would have told you that my research broadly focused on emotions at work and employee well being. I was researching how employees regulated their emotions at work in the context of customer service exchanges (e.g., Gabriel, Daniels, Diefendorff, & Greguras, 2015; Gabriel & Diefendorff, 2015) or how people reacted to salient affective events, such as accomplishing direct and indirect patient care tasks in nursing (e.g., Gabriel, Diefendorff, & Erickson, 2011). I was also fascinated by understanding within-person processes, using methods such as experience sampling (e.g., Beal, 2015) or continuous rating assessments (e.g., Ruef & Levenson, 2007) to examine my effects. Knowing what happened day-to-day or moment-to-moment was more intrinsically interesting to me than considering how aspects of the work environment operated statically, or “in general.”