USC launches new Ph.D. program in field of occupational science
At a time in our history when “What do you do?” appears (perhaps mercifully) to have supplanted “How do you do?” as the opening to virtually any conversation between new acquaintances, USC has become the first university to launch a Ph.D. program in occupational science.
Florence Clark, professor and chair of the Department of Occupational Therapy, in which the program is based, defines occupational science as a multidisciplinary field seeking to promote a theoretical understanding of why people engage in given occupations and the effects of those occupations on human functioning at all levels.
“How we spend our time really expresses the essence of one’s humanity,” she says. “One finds meaning in one’s life through one’s actions.
“There are studies that show that what people do every day affects their health, quality of life, stress level and emotional sense of well-being. It seems the ways in which people invest their time are ultimately going to have enormous significance on their quality of life. That’s an obvious but overlooked assumption, as people have typically explored more esoteric topics within academic settings. Occupational science, however, celebrates the familiar. Its point of focus is the place and potency of human occupation in daily life.”
She has an enthusiastic supporter in C. Sylvester Whitaker, dean of the Division of Social Sciences and Communication in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Underlying the scholarly study of how human beings
choose to spend their time, he says, is the growing realization that people are not so much a product of, say, what they eat, as of what they do.
“In many ways,” he says, “this insight, when I was first exposed to it during my early weeks as dean, was as startling as Freud's conception of the unconscious. We have rarely ever looked at how what we do governs who we are.”
Take, for instance, the study of the effects of prolonged television watching, one of the premier occupations of the midto late-20th century. One study by occupational scientists revealed that adolescents tend to spend most of their waking time either shmoozing with their peers or watching the tube. Moreover, the study demonstrated a link between excessive TV-watching and pronounced antisocial personality traits.
Clark herself observes that the common Southern California ordeal of prolonged freeway travel appears to have generated an entirely new occupational culture.
“People are now reconstructing the experience of being in a car. They can maximize their time devoted to it. They think about what they can get done in their cars through the course of the day. They have stereo systems, plush interiors, tapes, phones, status-symbol cars. In fact, people are creating car cultures — and as a consequence, daily living is becoming innervated by all of these responses to the things people don’t choose to do, but have to do.”
Sheldon Teitelbaum