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Description

Gossip is everywhere. We hear it, we share it, and we sometimes learn a lot from it. But what happens when the “T” is being spilled at work?

Drs. Ben Kinnear, Hannah Kakara Anderson, and Justin Bullock are joined by Dr. Michael Chaikof to dive into the surprisingly complicated world of gossip in medical education. Is it just venting and drama, or can gossip actually help us survive training? They unpack how gossip can help us debrief, bond with colleagues, prepare for what’s coming, and decode the hidden curriculum—while also fueling anxiety, shame, hierarchy, and threats to psychological safety.

So is workplace gossip good for us, bad for us, or a little bit of both? Grab the tea and join us.

Timestamps

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Paper Citation

Chaikof M, Bodley J, Farrugia M, Tannenbaum E, White BAA. A Qualitative Study of Workplace Gossip in the Residency Learning Environment. J Grad Med Educ. 2024;16(6):684-690. doi:10.4300/JGME-D-24-00153.1

Transcript

00:00:00                    [music plays]

00:00:03 Hannah        Hi, my name is Hannah Kakara Anderson.

00:00:06 Ben             Hi, I’m Ben Kinnear.

00:00:08 Justin           And this is Justin Bullock. And together we are The Backstory Podcast. In health professions education, there is always more to the story, it’s just how far back you are willing to go. We are a medical education podcast that explores literature in health professions education. We’ll provide you with cutting-edge scholarship and cozy conversations with authors. You’ll hear the three of us stumble through the literature, and then we’ll bring on the authors to the podcast for their side of the story.

00:00:38 Ben             Hello, and welcome to The Backstory Podcast. In health professions education there’s always more to the story, it’s just how far back you’re willing to go. I’m Ben, and I’m here with Hannah.

00:00:48 Hannah        Hi, what’s up.

00:00:50 Ben             And Justin.

00:00:51 Justin           Nephrology logging on.

00:00:53 Ben             Friends, have you ever heard the expression ‘spill the tea’? Do you know where it comes from?

00:00:59 Hannah        I do not know where it comes from. I used to say ‘spill the beans’ a lot growing up, so I wonder if it’s related to that?

00:01:08 Ben             I’m not sure, but I did do a bit of a deep dive. Now, I’m not a linguist but according to multiple online sources that I accessed through Google, the phrase originates from drag ballroom culture, particularly Black queer culture. I saw multiple sites citing Ru Paul’s Drag Race as where the phrase really took off. Now, I always assumed it was tea, like T E A, the drink, as if we’re having a beverage and sharing insider information and we get so excited we might spill some tea. But it’s actually capital T, like the letter, standing for truth.

00:01:43 Justin           I’m wondering if we need to consult Urban Dictionary, because I feel like I’ve also heard, you know, “The tea is piping hot.” And as a Black gay person, I feel like that’s my—I’m using—I guess I’m using ‘T’ for truth and the piping hot sipping version of tea.

00:02:01 Ben             Why not have it be both? I also want to say, I am not claiming that is absolute truth, this is just where Google led me, so. We’ll say it’s both. Whichever one resonates with you, that’s what we’ll go with. Either way, today we’ll be talking about spilling the tea in residency. And by that I mean we’re talking about gossip. We’re reviewing a paper by Dr Michael Chaikof and his colleagues titled, ‘A Qualitative Study of Workplace Gossip in the Resident Learning Environment’. It appeared in the December 2024 edition of the Journal of Graduate Medical Education. Most of the authors are from the University of Toronto, with the senior author, Dr White, being from Mass General in Boston. Did either of you partake in some hot goss while you were studying?

00:02:45 Hannah        I mean, who hasn’t, first of all? But when you said that, the first thing I think of is the gossip—quote unquote ‘gossip’—that was among my group of friends during training about, you know, how to navigate certain classes, certain professors, certain supervisors. Kind of the code that we had for basically who was safe and who was an ally and who wasn’t. Also like, you know, gossip. Like fun stuff, definitely.

00:03:13 Justin           Well I’ve like, yeah—Hannah, yours is a very professional version of gossip. My gossip was much more gossipy gossip. We’ll let Dr Chaikof tell us who got it right. So, back in college I ran track and there was an email account that was called Gossip Girl. And Gossip Girl was an inherited account; each year it got passed from one person on the team to another person on the team, but the identity of Gossip Girl was never revealed. And Gossip Girl’s role was basically to make matches for our ‘trom’, or track prom. And it would obviously put all the people who were couples together, who the team may or may not know were couples. And it also, of course, put people together who it thought should be couples. And so every year it was this big thing, first of just figuring out who Gossip Girl was—and you never knew because they never would actually reveal—and some people would pretend like they were Gossip Girl but they actually weren’t. And this probably all culminated when I was the captain of the team and we had this captain training that we would do with our coach. And one year our coach basically was considering making a rule against intra-team dating. And there were eight captains, and we were like, “Uh, Coach, do you know that six of us are dating someone [chuckles] on the team currently?” And so that rule did not go through because he would have had to get rid of all the captains—half the team basically. So, college track was a high intra-team dynamic gossip filled place.

00:04:36 Ben             This is probably a good time for me to reveal to both of you that the reason I chose this paper was simply to learn more of the hot goss about your lives. So, thank you for spilling the tea. This is fantastic. Now the authors of this paper, they were aiming to understand the function and impact of workplace gossip on resident experiences in the learning environment. They were interested in gossip both from and about residents. Now terms are important, and they defined gossip as, quote, “An evaluative discussion between two or more individuals about an absent third party.” Just to break that down a little bit, when I hear ‘evaluative’, it implies to me some form of judgement being made. And when I hear ‘absent’, it implies a bit of a power differential because one person is not there to participate. They specifically differentiate gossip from rumor, by stating that rumor is, quote, “Spreading unverified or untrue information.” So, there’s a bit of a dynamic of veracity there. I’m curious, what do you all think of these definitions?

00:05:38 Justin           Well I’m definitely a fan of any paper that does—takes intentional time to sort of define its definitions early on in the paper, so I’m very appreciative of the authors for that. One thing I do wonder as I hear this definition is, I feel like there is some like emotional valence that’s missing from this initial definition of gossip. I feel like in my experience of gossip—this is just day to day, not from an academic perspective—there’s kind of this like voyeuristic or like entertaining aspect of this exchange of information. And yeah, so I’m really interested to see how this definition is going to evolve as the authors go through the paper.

00:06:15 Ben             Okay, lets dive into it. So, in the introduction, the authors note that gossip is traditionally regarded as, quote, ‘deviant behavior’, which kind of gets to what you were saying, Justin. And it can lead to scapegoating and reinforcement of group power dynamics. They also note that it can serve some helpful purposes such as fostering relationships, cultural learning and self-reflection or self-evaluation. Now for their methods, they decided to conduct a constructivist grounded theory study, with semi-structured interviews of participants from two residency programs at the University of Toronto. They wanted one surgical and one non-surgical program, so they chose OBGYN and psychiatry. They recruited participants via email and ended up interviewing seven residents total, ranging from second year residents to fifth year residents. So, no interns or first year residents were included. I don’t think that was by design, that was just by who volunteered. And I will say, seven residents, even for a qualitative study, is a fairly small sample size. We can unpack that, perhaps. Participants were provided the definition of gossip prior to interviews to ground the conversation, and they used thematic analysis with inductive coding to generate their results. What do you think of this approach?

00:07:28 Hannah        Well, in constructivist grounded theory, constant comparative coding or analysis is, to me, one of the hallmarks of the method. Constant comparative analysis is this iterative process where the researchers simultaneously code while they’re analyzing and comparing new data with existing data. This is often done at the level of the code, at the level of the data itself. It’s a constant comparison, like it says in the name. And so, I was, you know, pleased to see that. I did wonder, as a reader I wanted some rationale or reasoning for why the thematic analysis and the inductive coding was introduced in the methods, instead of calling it ‘the constant comparative method’, which it seemed like what was done. And some backstory here that I reflected on was that sometimes in a review process, even among authors and then sometimes in the peer review process, a reviewer or an editor will ask you to label your methods as one thing. They’ll say like, “Oh this is thematic analysis and you should call it that, and you change the label of what you did based on your peer review.” I would have liked to see the alignment of constructivist grounded theory in the constant comparison labeling, but they were labeled as thematic analysis and inductive coding in the methods. So, that was my nerdy reviewer rant.

00:08:50 Ben             Okay, let’s see what they found. Now the authors organized their findings under three general headings: the good, the bad, and the complicated or workplace gossip. For the good, they said gossips helped residents process and reaffirm their clinical experiences. It functioned almost like a debriefing tool and as a way to socially bond. They also noted that gossip about future experiences like upcoming rotations or attendings they’re going to work with were useful for road-mapping what to expect. For the bad, gossip contributed to anxiety and fear, both about upcoming events like rotations and attendings, as well as worrying about becoming the subject of negative gossip. I can resonate with that strongly—when you hear people gossiping you wonder, “What about me?” For the complicated, they reported that hearing gossip—meaning about other people—suggested an insider status and promoted group bonding, but it also created pressure to participate in the gossip, which made some people uncomfortable. 00:09:50 Hearing about critical incidents or others’ clinical choices was helpful in terms of meaning making, and it was also helpful in understanding the culture of expectations for different learning environments. So, in short it developed and perpetuated the hidden curriculum. The authors note that, at times, this set the stage for things like shame reactions, and again, sometimes caused fear of becoming the subject of gossip. In the discussion section the authors note that in this way gossip might actually threaten psychological safety. And there’s a bit more that I want to discuss, but first I want to pause and hear what you all think of the results.

00:10:26 Justin           The first thing I want to address is something, Ben, that you said earlier about the seven participants. This is something where I find myself in eternal journey that I continue to be on around my positivist medical training brain that wants to see more people, and feeling like less than ten is a small number. And then the sort of qualitative side where someone once introduced me to the concept of catalytic validity, which is basically a concept that we believe that results are sort of valid based on that which it does to us. And so, if the results are like compelling and moving to you in a way that feels like it’s sufficiently capturing a complex concept, then sometimes, you know, we might actually not need as many people as we say we do. And in reality, when I’m doing a lot of studies, oftentimes, I have some artificial number than I kind of had decided at the beginning, and so yeah, I talk about sufficiency and all these things, but sometimes we are doing it just for this number aspect of ourself. 00:11:25 Specifically about these methods, the thing that obviously is screaming to me as someone who is very interested in critical theory, is thinking about power. Which is why I’m very happy that the authors talk about psychological safety. I think what the trainees are very clearly saying here is that sometimes participating in gossip becomes this power dynamic that they may feel compelled to participate in. I’m curious when we talk with Dr Chaikof about the results—I would like to hear, you know, how often learners identified themselves as the source of starting gossip, versus not.

00:11:58 Hannah        I am so glad you introduced that idea of catalytic validity to me. This is the first time I’m hearing of it, so I am learning right alongside listeners who are hearing that for the first time. That really resonates with me, and I felt that while reading this paper. To me the number of folks involved in a study speaks little about the resonance or meaning that it has to me as an educator or to learners that I work with. I think the resonance that it has, that feeling of like, “Oh yeah, I’ve done this,” or, “Oh yeah, I’ve participated in this and I recognize myself and others in the findings,” I totally felt that with these results.

00:12:40 Ben             Yeah, I have also never heard of catalytic validity so thank you for introducing that, Justin. And that is from a guy who studied validity for his PhD. So, maybe I should have heard of that but I haven’t. And I totally agree. These results really resonated with me, both as—I’m flashing back to being a trainee but also as a supervisor. And I will say, I think that the results could have been even more transferable had they been packaged into a theory or into actual themes, rather than just good, bad and complicated. What—the way they’re listed are very helpful, but I would love to see how they could actually be synthesized a little bit more. And I would have loved to hear some quotes. I didn’t see any quotes in this paper and I bet the quotes that they got were incredibly rich. On to the discussion. The authors share some models of gossip based on work by Dores Cruz and colleagues. It was an interesting paper structure because these models come after the discussion rather than in the results. 00:13:40 And so, I don’t know if there was a particular intent in structuring that way, but it really made it jump off the page because it came after the discussion. And these models depict triads of gossiper, who is sharing the gossip; audience, who is receiving the gossip; and the subject, about whom the gossip is being said. Now, I want to call out the impact of hierarchy, as you mentioned, Justin. They get into this idea of upward gossip versus level gossip versus downward gossip. Upward gossip is when residents gossip about faculty, so up the hierarchy. Level gossip is when residents are gossiping about other residents. And those—both upward and level gossip—had more positive impacts than downward gossip, which is when faculty are gossiping about residents, going down the hierarchy. Downward gossip amplified pressure on residents to participate, as you might imagine, and the threat to their psychological safety. So, to all the faculty listeners out there: don’t gossip about residents in general, and especially don’t gossip about residents to other residents. 00:14:40 So, to summarize, my final takeaway is that gossip is just part of complex group interactions. It can serve generative purposes but can also be destructive and can threaten psychological safety. And it’s also interesting the impact that hierarchy can play, whether it’s flowing upward, downward or staying level. So, Justin and Hannah, is the tea piping hot? Please share your hot tea for this paper. Justin, you first.

00:15:09 Justin           So, my hot tea has been—I’m actually going to disagree with you that gossip should never go down. And what I’m going to say is I think that a lot of people, particularly minoritized trainees, rely on gossip to know how to navigate through very complex, racist, other ‘-ist’—every form of ‘-ist’ systems. And sometimes, you know, hearing from other people in any direction of how a person should navigate is like critical insider information for a person to make it through training. And so, I think gossip can actually be protective in all directions. And, of course, it can be destructive.

00:15:52 Ben             Hannah?

00:15:53 Hannah        That was an incredibly well-constructed hot tea. I don’t think mine’s going to be as nicely packaged, but it’s along the same lines. Which is, my hot tea is that gossip is one of those constructs in our society, like love, like education, like care. Concepts that are almost always attributed to women and marginalized communities. And when I think of gossip, I think of my aunts and my cousins sitting around a table and us talking about our lives and about the sort of worlds that we inhabit. And, just like Justin said, it’s such an extraordinarily powerful tool for communicating who is safe, who is not safe, talking about people’s lives and really constructing a community. And so, yeah, I appreciate the tension, the complicatedness that’s reflected in these results too. And I just think that gossip gets a bad rap because it’s associated with women and with marginalized communities, when really there’s a lot more to the story.

00:17:04 Ben             This is some amazing hot tea. I love it. My hot tea is that, as you both know, assessment has been a big part of my career so far. And I’m curious where the line is between assessment and gossip, and I wonder if that’s part of the reason why assessment often feels so harmful to people who are being assessed. By definition—at least the definitions that the authors use—it often is a form of gossip, and I wonder if we could improve assessment by translating what we know from the literature on gossip and even on rumor into health professions education assessment. And I know there are some people who are doing this work. Dr Laura Chiel has done some really great work starting to explore the relationship between gossip and feedback, and I think there’s potential overlap there.

00:17:53 Justin           Since I’ve used my hot tea already, can I now do my hot ramble?

00:17:56 Hannah        Sure, Justin. Why not?

00:17:58 Ben             Justin, always room for a hot ramble. Always.

00:18:00 Justin           Thank you. My hot ramble is related to what you said, Ben, which is the one thing that this paper made me think of a lot is feeding forward feedback. Which is something that I’ve been talking a lot about recently because I feel very complex feelings about it. That sometimes it can be, for me as an attending, helpful if I have information about a trainee that’s fed forward from me from previous supervisors who’ve worked with them. But there’s obviously so much bias that can happen from feeding forward feedback, and it can turn into more gossip and less actively evaluative. And so, one of the things that someone has recommended that I implement, which I am adopting, is asking the learner basically to feed forward feedback about themselves. So, like, you know, what feedback have you gotten, what are you trying to work on based on what other people have told you as an explicit question, and that way the learner sort of control the, air quote, ‘gossip’ about them and sort of guide their learning.

00:18:56 Ben             You know, it’s interesting you say that, Justin. I used this very paper for a journal club, for one of our med ed pathway sessions. And when I was talking about it with the residents, they all very readily said, “Oh yeah, gossip is really important for feeding forward about the upcoming attendings for all the reasons we’ve talked about in this paper.” And when I asked, “How do you feel about it if they do that about you?”, they were really frustrated and upset and felt like it was unfair. Now, it’s true there is a power hierarchy there, but there’s a lot of literature coming out that teaching evaluations also hold a lot of power. So, I think the evaluative threat that people feel, while it certainly is imbalanced, is bi-directional and the feed forward threat actually kind of makes everybody feel under threat. Not just learners but also the assessors. So, it’s tricky. Alright, the time that everyone’s been waiting for. We’re done rambling. [chuckles] And we’re now bringing on Dr Chaikof. We’re so incredibly excited to have him join us. He is a urogynecologist who is also involved in multiple ways in medical education at the University of Toronto. What would you like us to call you?

00:20:03 Michael       Michael’s fine. Thanks for asking.

00:20:05 Ben             Thanks, Michael. Welcome to The Backstory Podcast. Thank you very much for joining us. So, to start off, can you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and one thing that listeners may not know about you?

00:20:16 Michael       First of all, thank you so much for having me and for doing this. I—that was a very cool and strange experience to listen to three people talk about my work… right in front of me. It’s sort of like being, like, I don’t know, being in a changing room and [chuckles] everyone’s watching you try on clothes. But, as you said, I’m a urogynecologist at the University of Toronto. I work at Sunnybrook, which is one of our large teaching hospitals here in Toronto. I also do low-risk obstetrics as part of my practice, and I’m involved in medical education in a few different ways. I am the site coordinator for OBGYN residents. I also supervise general medicine trainees, PA students more recently, and I’m one of the education leads for our women and babies program at the hospital. One thing people may not know about me—well, I guess you guys don’t know anything about me. I have two daughters—Hallie and Margo—they’re one and three, and they are teaching me about education in a completely new lens. And I heard someone tell me this recently and it’s true: being a doctor does not help you be a better parent, but being a parent really makes you a better doctor. And I’m learning that firsthand right now.

00:21:16 Hannah        So, in The Backstory Podcast, we like to talk about where papers come from and how they get started. And my question is really: what got you interested in this specific topic, and what led to this paper?

00:21:29 Michael       So, I’m very glad you asked. So, this paper was kind of a long time coming. So, I started a residency in 2015. And as a second- or third-year resident, I started to struggle with this idea that everyone was talking about everyone. And when something would happen on the ward or on the labor floor, in the OR, almost as much as dealing with the fact that I had made an error, had done something wrong, was the fear and anxiety around thinking that other people were going to find out about it and it was going to affect my career trajectory and my job offers and my fellowships and all these things. And we were very lucky at U of T. We had a sort of an in-house psychological support—people that would help you and talk to you. And I went to one of them and I said, “I just feel this anxiety all the time, that people are talking about my performance and that, you know, they’re just gossiping about what I’m doing. And so, if I make a mistake, it’s not just that I made a mistake, everyone’s going to hear about it.” 00:22:25 And he looked at me—Chris, who was amazing, and he said, you know, “If I could fix the problem of gossip, I wouldn’t need to be in this job any more at all. This is the core of the whole issue.” And so, that kind of planted the seed in my head, that this was something I really wanted to kind of explore and learn about more. And so, for a first years I would—you know, I started reading about gossip. And I realized that basically there was nothing in the literature from medical education about gossip, but there was all this stuff from sociology and business about how gossip functions in the world. Because I think, Ben, you said before, and it’s true, gossip is just the reality of human beings interact with other human beings. Like, it’s an impossible thing to avoid, which is why in the paper we really tried to emphasize that it’s not inherently a good or bad thing, it’s just… a thing that’s part of people talking to each other. But then the idea kind of percolated for a while and while I was doing my medical education master’s, I got hooked up with BA White, who is an amazing qualitative researcher, and she was my mentor, supervisor on this paper which ended up becoming my master’s project. 00:23:28 And really it was with her help that I was able to even kind of come up with the idea and understand how to start asking these questions properly.

00:23:37 Hannah        So, I’d really like to know what reflections you have after listening to us talk about your paper. What did we get wrong? What did we misunderstand? What’s something that maybe you want to dive into more?

00:23:50 Michael       So, I don’t think you got anything wrong. I mean, part of it is—part of what’s so fun about this topic is that I don’t really think there’s a right and a wrong way to understand gossip. I think we all—you know, we all come from our own experiences of gossip. And I love what you said about your aunts sitting around the table talking, because that’s—we all have that history. And a few things that I sort of noticed you talking about that I wanted to explore more. First of all, thank you for calling me out on the methods. Part of it is that this was my first ever qualitative research study I ever did. And to be honest, you know, up to the level of the editors of the journal who published this paper—which, by the way, was not easy to publish, and maybe we’ll talk about that later. There was a lot of discussion and disagreement about what this even was. So, up until the point that we were writing it up, we weren’t sure if it was a phenomenology or a constructivist grounded theory, and there was sort of ongoing debate and discussion. And you know, one journal that rejected it thought it was one thing, a different journal that ultimately accepted it thought it was something different. And that was sort of a fascinating learning experience for me. 00:24:50 And ultimately, I think it was grounded theory in the end, when I realized what we were actually doing, but I think there is an argument to be made that we were sort of exploring the lived experience of gossip, which really is more phenomenological. So, I think you were right that there’s something a little bit confused in how we structured this and how we wrote it up. But ultimately, from a methods perspective, what was interesting—and I’m also glad you guys brought up the question of sample size, because I had the same reaction—BA and I did all the coding, and when she said, “Okay, I think we’re done. We understand what we’re trying to understand and nothing new is coming out of this,” I said, “What do you mean? We’ve only interviewed like seven people. Like, how can we be done? The sample size is too small.” And so, it was kind of like a—it almost felt like a brave thing to do, to stop [chuckles] and to just kind of take a bite out of the data we had. And I think ultimately it was—that was a huge learning experience for me too, was sort of understanding when to stop and when to start going deeper, as opposed to just collecting more and more and more.

00:25:47 Ben             I want to know—this vibe I had that people were talking about other people gossiping but maybe not so much about themselves as the source of gossip. So, it’s like, “I feel sort of forced to gossip when other people are gossiping.” But how much did people talk about themselves as the originators of gossip?

00:26:04 Michael       Not a lot. Part of that could just be the way we asked the questions, because we asked very vaguely on purpose, sort of, “What is you experience of gossip in the workplace?” And sort of like when you ask people, “Are you a good driver, below average, average, above average”? And like eighty percent of people think they’re above average drivers. So, I think, you know, eighty percent of people think they’re below average gossipers. And I say that as someone who talks a lot and actually likes to gossip, so there’s some sort of bias there. People really perceive the gossip that’s coming toward them or that’s around them in the environment, but not as much the gossip that’s coming out from them. And I think when they did describe themselves gossiping, it was always in a more positive light—Justin, you touched on this. Especially for people that come from under-represented backgrounds, marginalized communities—that sort of warning system you have in place of saying, “This faculty is a safe person, that faculty’s not a safe person.” Or, “You’re on call with this person, you’d better read about this before your call shift because otherwise you’re going to get… you know, eaten alive.” Like, all of these road-mapping, forewarning functions of gossip. I think people talked about themselves doing that. People did not—at least did not outwardly often admit gossiping in a negative way. That—maybe that’s because I didn’t ask the right questions.

00:27:15 Ben             You mentioned that you love to gossip, Michael. I’m curious, how has this research changed how you yourself gossip?

00:27:23 Michael       Well, I think there is something very freeing about reading sort of from the sociology literature that gossip is inevitable. Because, you know, it’s true what Hannah said that gossip if often very female-coded and therefore it’s kind of villainized or it’s seen in a negative light, right? Because, you know, you think about gossipy women sitting around idly talking rather than doing productive things, right. Like there’s this whole societal narrative that happens around gossip. But when you think about it—I mean, for example in early humanity, right, if—Ben, if you say to Justin, “Hey, Hannah ate those berries and got very sick,” right, now Justin knows not to go eat the berries without having to go taste them himself and get sick himself. Right? That’s gossip. Like that’s an evaluative conversation about someone who is not there and that serves a really important function in how a society works. 00:28:13 There’s all this literature from the business world that in certain companies, gossip actually serves as education. And so, for example, if you come into a new company, how do you know how teamwork is done in an appropriate way? Well, because other people tell you how others failed and you can avoid those same pitfalls yourself without having to learn the lesson on your own. So, there is some kind of positive function to gossiping. I think what this has made me reflect on is really the kind of hierarchy piece. And it was also interesting because I did the interviews when I was still a fellow, and we published this one—so I wasn’t a faculty because it took a long time [chuckles] to get this published. And so, when I am gossiping, especially in the workplace, I really am thinking about, like, who am I talking to and who am I talking about? And what—not just is that appropriate and if that person was here would they be happy with what I’m saying about them, but also what subliminal message am I sending to my audience, right? So, I think one of the things that came up a number of times, which was kind of surprising and really interesting for me, was this kind of in-group, out-group phenomenon. 00:29:14 So, you’re a resident and you’re on call—and I think OB is such an interesting specialty to study because we’re—you know, 3 o’clock in the morning, on the labor floor, in-person, tired, stressed, high-stakes. There’s a real kind of loss of inhibitions that happens. So, you’re like sitting with your attending at the desk and your attending is… telling you, “I was on call with this person and they did this,” or, “Did you hear that that other attending like cheated on her husband?” and blah, blah, blah, right. Like—and that becomes like this nugget of, “Oh, I’m in the in-group.” Like you’re establishing—and this also comes up in the sociology literature—like you’re establishing these sort of groups based on who gets the gossip and who doesn’t get the gossip. And on the one hand as the resident in that situation you feel special because you feel like, “I’m getting selected to receive this hot tea,” as you said. But at the same time am I now feeling pressured to have conversations that I don’t really feel comfortable having? And subliminally am I thinking to myself, “Oh, Justin is talking about Hannah to me in this fun way, but like what’s he going to say to Hannah when I’m not around and do I have to worry?” 00:30:20 So, there’s all of these kind of messages we’re sending subliminally and I think—I don’t know if I’m any better but I’m more aware of it. [chuckles] So that’s kind of—that’s how I think about it.

00:30:30 Hannah        I love all of that. And what you highlight of how doing a study can actually change how you see yourself, maybe how you reflect on your own actions. And also the real power of reading sociology research and feeling sort of freed or validated that what you experience is normal, human experience. That’s the power of research. I am really curious: could you tell us a little bit about the publication experience, what that journey was like?

00:31:01 Michael       Yes. I think this was the fourth journal that we submitted this paper to. I don’t have a ton of qualitative experience. I’m trying to get more because, to be honest, writing this was so much fun. Doing to interviews was really fun, coding was really fun. I have a few trainees that were working with me on offshoots on this project to understand gossip with different people and in different environments. You know, initially there were comments about sample size. How could you only interview seven people and expect us to have good data? And I think there were also a number of comments that we got about, “This is a really interesting topic but we’re not really sure what this is adding. We don’t really know what to do with this or where to put it.” That’s the sense I get from the editors’ feedback. 00:31:41 And then finally the JGME—and I have to say, the editors at the JGME who were assigned to my paper were the most engaged, responsive, really dedicated reviewers I’ve ever dealt with. I really felt like they were teachers [chuckles] more so than editors in this process. And there was discussions back and forth via the reviews about, “Are you sure you understand what type of study you’re even doing and what you did and what you’re exploring?” So, I think there were at least four rounds of edits also to get this published. Someone said why weren’t there any quotes in the paper. I also feel that because the initial draft was like three thousand words longer and had all these really long quotes. [chuckles] And then we were told by everyone that it was too long, so then we took out all the quotes and put them in a table, which was cheating. And then we sort of were going to put them in a supplement but nobody wanted that. So, there are not quotes in the paper but there are such good quotes, I can dig it up and share some with you. There—it was a really interesting process and I feel I learned a lot.

00:32:36 Hannah        Thank you for sharing that whole journey. I have a mentor who always says, “This paper has a home, we just have to find the right home.” But I’m so grateful for editors who take the time to teach through the reviews and reviewers who take the time to teach through their reviews. It’s a reminder to me to do my reviews that I have waiting in my inbox. So, I’ll get on that after this.

00:32:59 Ben             I also appreciate you modeling positive gossip about those JGME editors.

00:33:04 Michael       That’s right, yeah. Although positive gossip is not always good either. I thought kind of early on that we were going to find that, you know, when you say nice things about people, it sort of motivates others and it creates this positive environment. Which is partially true, but that was something else that came up: even the positive gossip makes people very fearful of gossip. One of the residents that we interviewed talked about going on a new rotation, and the faculty there said, “Oh, we just worked with your friend and she was so good in the OR and she has such great hands and, you know, she really did this, this and this.” And this person thinking, “Oh, I guess everyone’s talking and also like now am I going to measure up? And who are they going to tell that to, whether or not I measure up?” So, I don’t want to make the editors of other journals jealous or nervous because [chuckles] I’m talking about the JGME so nicely.

00:33:51 Justin           We all wanted to thank you very much. We loved hearing about this paper. We’ve been talking with Dr Michael Chaikof about his paper entitled ‘A Qualitative Study of Workplace Gossip in the Resident Learning Environment’. Once again, you can find in JGME, the Journal of Graduate Medical Education. Thanks again to our guest, Dr Michael Chaikof.

00:34:11 Michael       Bye, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. [music fades in]

00:34:14 Justin           Dr Hannah Kakara Anderson.

00:34:16 Hannah        Thanks everyone for listening to the Backstory Podcast.

00:34:19 Justin           Dr Ben Kinnear.

00:34:21 Ben             Bye everyone.

00:34:22 Justin           And my name is Justin Bullock. Nephrology signing off.

00:34:32 Hannah        The Backstory Podcast is supported in part by the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation. Production and editing by Rachel Holloway. Music by Hannah Kakara Anderson. Artwork by Kaitlyn Ripaldi. The Backstory Podcast is a sponsored project of the Learning Design Collective. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder that the opinions expressed here are our own, and don’t represent the views of any institutions. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. For show notes and links, visit our website. If you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and leave us a review, and check us out on LinkedIn, Instagram and Bluesky @TheBackstoryPod.

00:35:18 Ben             Sorry, I feel like all my answers are hot rambles but hopefully there’s something useable in here. [chuckles] You see how quickly you learn the hot ramble, we didn’t have to define it, for you, you just rolled with it. [chuckles]

00:35:29 Justin           I’ll say, “Hannah and Ben.” Okay, so—

00:35:30 Hannah        Wait, what am I supposed to say?

00:35:32 Justin           You say, “Goodbye,” however you want to.

00:35:33 Hannah        Okay.

00:35:35 Justin           When I call your name.

00:35:36 Ben             Hannah, you’re supposed to say ‘workplace-based assessment’.

00:35:39 Justin           [laughs]

00:35:39 Hannah        [laughs] No, please. Don’t make me. Oh, Justin, you have to say nephrology logging out.

00:35:46 Justin           Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay.

00:35:47 Hannah        Yeah, otherwise you’re just going to stay logged in. [music fades out]