Research Project | Every Election a Nightmare

Principal investigator

Nora Ruck (nora.ruck@sfu.ac.at)

Project team

• Sara Paloni (sara.paloni@sfu.ac.at)
• Anoel Alshuth (anoel.alshuth@sfu.ac.at)

Co-researchers within this project

University researchers:

• Ass.Prof. Dr. Nora Ruck (Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität)
• ​Dr. Sara Paloni (Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität)
• ​Anoel Alshuth, BSc. (Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität)

Practitioner researchers:

• ​Dr. Sigrid Awart (Peregrina)
• ​Dr. Andrea Kaiser-Horvath (Peregrina)
• Dr. Bettina Zehetner (Frauen* beraten Frauen*)

“Every Election a Nightmare” follows the approach of Critical Participatory Action Research, aiming to collectively generate knowledge and initiate change through collaboration between different societal groups (Torre & Fine, 2019). Dr. Bettina Zehetner from Frauen* beraten Frauen (Women* counseling women*) and Dr. Sigrid Awart and Dr. Andrea Kaiser-Horvath from Peregrina had decided on the term “practitioner researchers” in the previous research project. In so-called participatory contact zones (Torre et al., 2008, p. 24), the practitioner researchers are directly involved in the research process alongside the university researchers and can contribute their contextual, practical knowledge. The research questions and design were thus decided jointly with the practitioner researchers.

Since the object of research is structured by common experiences in the professional field, the group discussion method according to Bohnsack (1989) is the suitable method of data collection (Przyborski & Wohlrab-Sahr, 2014). In group discussions, shared knowledge is articulated, such as is formed within the institutional structure of the women’s counseling center (Bohnsack, 1989). Group discussions are planned with team members from all of the women’s and girls’ counseling centers in Vienna that are organized within the Austrian Network of Women’s and Girls’ Counseling Centers.

In addition to the group discussions, the management level of each participating counseling center will fill out a short questionnaire, developed in collaboration with the practitioner researchers, in order to record the organizational and funding structure so that the results of the group discussions can be related to these framework conditions. This questionnaire also records the efforts and amount of bureaucratic work in the respective counseling centers and whether these can be billed to the funding agencies or remain unpaid.

The reflexive grounded theory method according to Breuer et al. (2019) is used to analyze the data.

The analysis of the material is designed to be partially participatory (Schlingmann, 2020) based on methodological expertise and will initially be carried out by the university researchers. The results will then be validated with the practitioner researchers in interpretation workshops and further developed into applicable solutions for everyday professional practice in intervention workshops, in order to make the generated knowledge applicable and publicly available (Fine & Torre, 2019).

• Which emotional contradictions do employees at different women’s counseling centers in Vienna experience, and what kind of emotional labor do they entail?
• How do structural and organizational conditions shape and perpetuate the emotional labor of employees of women’s counseling centers?
• What are the consequences this entails, which strategies do the employees of the counseling centers employ to deal with challenges in their work?

Women’s counseling centers perform indispensable work in providing psychosocial, legal, and medical care for women in Vienna. These institutions, which are mostly organized autonomously as non-profit or non-governmental organizations, perform essential tasks in society (see Gubitzer & Mader, 2011). Women’s counseling centers, like the social services sector in general, have been confronted in recent decades with the need to invest increasing amounts of time and resources in the financial maintenance of the organization and in the documentation of public funding, which is critically discussed in the literature as the economization and NGOization of social institutions. This is changing organizational structures, priorities regarding professional tasks, working conditions, but also working relationships and the distribution of responsibilities within the teams at women’s counseling centers (see Alvarez, 1999; Zehetner, 2020; Ana, 2023; Lang, 2023).

There is already a wide range of research on financial and structural changes in the NGO sector on the one hand and on emotional labor on the other. In a participatory project, we already began to explore the emotional contradictions of women’s counselors, but in the form of a case study with results that can hardly be generalized. “Every Election a Nightmare” aims to close this research gap.

The aim of the project is to research emotional labor in Vienna women’s counseling centers as invisible but central dimension of women’s counseling under conditions of NGOization. Together with practitioners from the field, emotional contradictions and conflicts are explored in a participatory process and strategies are developed on how to avoid overload, cope with institutional tensions, and productively strengthen relationships of care. The results are supposed to not only contribute to scientific theory formation, but to also have an impact on practice: through guidelines for bureaucratic work for women’s counseling centers as well as their funding authorities, through a workshop each with all women’s and girls’ counseling centers in Vienna and with the relevant funding authorities, and through goal-oriented public outreach.

• City of Vienna
• Funding amount: 50, 000.00 €

November 2025 – April 2027

As demonstrated in the predecessor projects “The Psychological Is Political” (FWF individual project, 2018-2022) and “Feminist-Psychological Voices in Vienna” (City of Vienna, 2022-2023), employees of women’s counseling centers not only provide counseling services to clients, but also face a considerable workload of financing and documentation work.

Our predecessor project “The Psychological is Participatory” (FWF TCS, 2022-2024) was able to show in a participatory research process with three practitioner researchers from the women’s counseling centers Frauen* beraten Frauen* and Peregrina (Dr. Bettina Zehetner, Dr. Andrea Kaiser-Horvath, Dr. Sigrid Awart) that women’s counselors experience emotional contradictions and conflicts between the demands of maintaining their own organization and ensuring high-quality counseling services. Navigating these contradictions requires emotional labor, which we are examining more closely in “Every Election a Nightmare.”