Chadron State professor Covolo published in book about drug recovery for families

CHADRON, Neb. – Chadron State College Justice Studies Instructor Danielle Covolo is one of several authors published in a newly released book titled Transcending Crisis by Attending to Care, Emotion, and Flourishing. Along with six colleagues, she contributed to the chapter titled From Discovery to Recovery: Parents’ Temporal Emotion Practice in Relation to a Child’s Opioid Use Disorder.

The other chapter authors, Dr. Melissa Swauger, Dr. Dana Hysock Witham, Dr. Alex Heckert, Dr. Christian Vaccaro, Dr. Victor Garcia, and Dr. Erick Lauber, either teach or taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where Covolo is a doctoral candidate in the Administration and Leadership Studies program. Her research interests center around unraveling cycles of violence and victimization to create safer communities. Her dissertation details self-healing practices and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous persons. 

“When I was on campus, I was awarded a Super Graduate Assistantship that included coding qualitative data from interviews. I was highly invested in coding the data, as I felt these parents' experiences could help others navigate the process of raising a child with a substance use disorder,” Covolo said.

She said her mentors noticed her dedication to the project and asked her to participate in compiling the chapter, even though, at the time, she had not yet finished her doctoral coursework or taken her comprehensive exam.

“Honestly, I was a little intimidated. I feel honored that my colleagues included me. I just told myself, ‘Publishing research is simply revision after revision, not about knowing everything,’” Covolo said.

Covolo said collaborating on the publication challenged her analytical skills.

“As a qualitative researcher, I had to shift my mindset from drug users to those with a substance use disorder. I had to, furthermore, explore how a child’s substance use disorder impacts a family unit,” Covolo said. “This was a group effort with countless hours back and forth on shared documents. Their mentorship and patience pushed my writing and research skills to a new level. Accepting their invitation taught me there is no such thing as a perfect manuscript.”

In the chapter’s abstract, the authors state that in intensely emotional interviews with 30 parents of adult children with opioid use disorder (OUD) they uncovered parents’ using multi-stage emotion management strategies in response to denial, shame, grief, and resilience to navigate their child’s OUD.

The abstract states that 20 percent of the U.S. population has a family member with a substance use disorder and that western Pennsylvania is at the epicenter of the national opioid epidemic. The researchers said for parents in the study, emotion management is never really complete. Instead, parents flourish by turning their fear and anxiety into positive action through participation in advocacy.