Spector lecture targets violence

Paul Spector believes workplace violence is a larger problem than national news media would have its audience believe.

“One recent study we did looked at assaults against nurses in hospitals,” said Spector, director of the industrial/organizational graduate program in USF’s Department of Psychology. “Nurses are very often assaulted. Out of a sample of a couple hundred nurses, more than a quarter of them told us that they had been assaulted in the past year.”

It is workplace violence such as this that will be the focus of Spector’s lecture today in the TECO room of the Phyllis P. Marshall Center at 4:30.

Spector will draw a distinction between physical violence and verbal aggression.

“Homicide in the workplace is what you see periodically in the media,” Spector said. “I’ll talk about factors in homicide and its prevalence. Then I’ll talk about what is much more prevalent, and that’s non-fatal assault and physical assault; also verbal assault, abusiveness, bullying – those sorts of things.”