Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods

Studying Language Issues That Matter

Monica Heller, Sari Pietikäinen, Joan Pujolar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317577577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods is a guide to conducting concrete ethnographic and discourse analytic research projects, written by top scholars for students and researchers in social science fields. Adopting a critical perspective focusing on the role of language in the construction of social difference and social inequality, the authors walk the reader through five key moments in the life of a research project: composing research questions, designing the project, doing fieldwork, performing data analysis and writing academic texts or otherwise engaging in conversation with different types of social actors about the project. These moments are illustrated by colour-coded examples from the authors' experiences that help researchers and students follow the sequential stages of a project. Clear and highly applicable, with a detailed workbook full of practical tips and examples, this book is a great resource for graduate-level qualitative methods courses in linguistics and anthropology, as well as methods courses in the humanities and social sciences that focus on the role of language in research. It is a timely text for investigating language issues that matter and have consequences for people's lives.

First Key Moment Formulating Your Research Question

1.1 Research Questions as (Hi)Stories and Conversations

The entire enterprise of putting together a research project hinges on the question you are asking. Everything else flows from there: what kinds of evidence will count as relevant to answering your question, how you will put it together, how you will make sense of it; all these subsequent steps flow from what you are asking and why you are asking it. Research questions are not always given the attention that they deserve. They take very little space in research reports and are often obscured by or combined with other notions such as “objectives,” “hypotheses” or “justifications.” However, they are the bedrock of your project, and both require more work and take more time than we generally expect. For these reasons, we are taking the time to fully examine what it means to ask a research question here.

Research questions have their own stories. They take different shapes, and we get to them in different ways. Then we try to answer them, and the process of answering brings up new questions. In this chapter, we reflect on how we choose and formulate our research questions. We emphasize four points:

1. (1) Research questions are part of complex and ongoing conversations with different stakeholders.
2. (2) Critical research questions leave room for the investigation of not just what, who, when, how (description) and why (explanation), but also for discovering their consequences, that is, what difference things make and for whom.
3. (3) Research questions are pivotal for your choice of methods, theory and site.
4. (4) The formulation of research questions typically evolves throughout the research project.

Points (1) and (2) involve ethical and political considerations that we will address in detail in Section 1.3 from page 30. However, research questions do not take shape in a vacuum. They derive first from our own inner conversations with ourselves about the world around us. You are therefore bound to have some kind of emotional investment, more or less marked, in these questions. More importantly, they take place in the conversations we have with other people who are part of that world too. Some of those people will share your interests and your questions, and some will not; some will share your perspectives, and others will disagree. No matter what, though, your conversations with them help you frame and sharpen your questions. (They will also help frame and sharpen your analyses and your discussions of research results; we will take those issues up when we discuss Moments 4 and 5, analysis and writing.) One way or another, our research questions emerge out of the stories of our lives and of the lives of the people whose paths we cross.

In the academic world, research questions may originate from very diverse circumstances. In some parts of the world, in some disciplines or fields, your research question may be decided by senior professors, or determined by the logic of the field. For example, if you wish to participate in the conversation about language revitalization, you will need to address at least one of the strands existing at time of writing (say, education, standardization, language ideologies, values) or else explain why you are asking a different question. In other fields, you may have more room for choice, at least within the academic conversation. However, you still need to be aware that research questions always have a complex (hi)story behind them which includes a broader range of participants in the conversation beyond academia. Your questions will connect with the interests of a variety of social or political groups, and with past and ongoing debates. This is always the case, but particularly so for critical research, which formulates questions around things that make a difference to people, that have value for them, that affect them emotionally and materially, and that they may struggle over.

These conversations may be explicit and evident, or implicit and hard to identify. They may be concentrated in specific areas, or they may be diffuse and distributed across a range of discursive spaces. Whatever the situation, you enter into ongoing conversations that were there before you arrived (and that you join as a special kind of participant as it continues to unfold). You need to map out its contours, and identify its participants. Here we provide some examples of how our own research has been shaped by political developments around us:

Monica arrived at her questions about language choice in Montréal by virtue of living there at a time when people were arguing about what language, English or French, to use in public. Clearly, this mattered a lot to people; they argued about it in the street, over dinner, in the media. What was this conflict about? What was at stake?

Joan was drawn into his research question in much the same way. However, when he met Monica he was intrigued by the differences between the Québec context, where the tensions were constructed largely in economic terms, and Catalonia, where the use of languages in public space and public institutions was explicitly linked to alignment with Fascism or democracy.

As a Finn, Sari could not help but be aware of the tension around the marginalized position of indigenous Sámi and the struggle for their rights that emerged at the same historical moment as the one that saw movements for minority language rights around the world. As elsewhere, many of these struggles focused on gaining autonomous control of what had been dominant language-using state institutions: schools, the media, health care, the law, government. As someone interested in media, she could see that the Sámi-language institutional world was distinguishing itself from the Finnish-language one, and this became something to explore.

In conclusion, we need to be aware of what research questions mean in the context of our own lives, and in the context of how we have learned to understand the world around us, whether from our own experience or from previous research, or both. Research questions have a history, both for us and for others. Our ways into our research questions cannot be separated from the ways in which the issues we address matter in our lives and in those of others. It might be less direct for you than it was for us. It almost certainly involves issues other than the minority language movements that emerged so strongly in the 1960s to 1980s. But we will assume that you are attending to a topic for some reason connected to how it matters to you, and it matters to you because it matters in the world around you. Let’s examine different ways into formulating research questions about it.

1.2 Different Ways to Get to Your Research Questions

No matter what the history is of the issue you pursue, or the types of people who feel that they can voice a view about it, if you address it as a researcher you are entering into a field where your statements and your procedures will have to follow specific rules and criteria. This is what sets apart research from arguments derived and knowledge produced from other areas of life. In other words, you are entering into a specific kind of conversation, one in which you have to make explicit your assumptions, expectations, commitments, argumentation procedures and all your other ways of working.

In this section we focus on the process of formulating the research question in critical language research projects. For convenience, we assume that research projects derive from a single question (although they may have more than one), though to be answerable in practical terms, the overall research question gets commonly broken down into smaller, more specific, questions.

1.2.1 The Forest and the Trees

Let us then assume that you are entering into a field because of your own biographical trajectory, and that you are entering a conversation that has already started, although that conversation can take a number of different shapes in different contexts inside and outside academia. Your experience and that conversation may have given you some initial ideas about what is going on, how and why. We will loosely call these hypotheses, that is, candidate accounts of things we see and experience, which are always called into question (supported, contradicted, modified) by new observations and by new experiences. In everyday life, these frames are usually implicit, or do not require much investigation or empirical confirmation. For example, people tend to believe things like “multilingualism is confusing and bad for your children,” or “multilingualism is enriching and improves your cognitive abilities.” We do not tend to bother to look closely at whether these hold up all the time, and we take them as true.

In research, you have to take the position that your formulation of the question is open, although it is based on a set of hypotheses drawn from your own experience, from the research literature and from your conversations with other stakeholders. That is, you are asking a real question, one that requires careful formulation, systematic and explicit investigation and analytical procedures, as well as explicit negotiations of position with other stakeholders. You do not yet have the answer to your question—otherwise, doing the research would be a waste of time. However, at the end of your research project, the results of your research lead, in turn, to new hypotheses and generate new research questions, as we describe below.

Put differently, your topic is not the same thing as your research question. Rather, your research question captures one aspect of your research topic—the one to which you are interested in finding an answer. In this sense, you ask a research question of your topic. Every research question has to have resonance beyond the particular setting or group of people it involves. It needs to set the scene about some particular way in which language matters, and then explain why a focus on some place, some period of time, some people, some activity, will shed light on that bigger question. It needs to translate, or transpose, the larger question onto things that are actually observable, generating questions specifically about those things. One way to test this is the “so what” question: think about the potential impact of your research. Does the question you are thinking of put a new spin on an old issue, or does it try to solve a new problem? What happens and to whom if you are able to find answers to your questions? Who will also care deeply about what you have to say? Will you be able to use it to decide for yourself how you feel about something, and what, if anything, you want to do about it?

There are many different ways of arriving at your question. (Practical tip: keep notes as you go along; they will help you develop the explicit formulations and procedures that you will eventually need.) One major aspect of these paths has to do with the continuing relationship between the forest and the trees. Any research project must have both. You might start with the forest (or even a set of forests): some big questions that have theoretical, methodological, social, political or economic importance. You might, for example, want to know about the making of social difference and social inequality—the big question that motivates much of our own research. You might want to know how and why language changes, or how racism and racial discrimination works or what categories of gender and sexuality are important to people today and why. Put in those terms, however, it is practically impossible to construct a research project that would answer those questions. They are so large as to constitute a long-term research agenda for many people. At the same time, they are good questions; starting from any one of them, your job then becomes looking for a way to render addressing that question feasible. You need to identify the trees, and pick the ones worth looking at, that is, the ones that help you see racism at work, or processes of construction of categories of gender and sexuality, or struggles over language that connect to access to education or employment.

However, because the biographies of researchers can be very diverse, it may also happen that their starting point is a set of trees. If that is the case with you, then your job is to find the broad question that makes some of the smaller ones meaningful and helps to see the connections between the small dots and the bigger pictures. The goal in the end is to explain the trees as a function of the forest, and to illuminate the forest through what you can discover about the trees.

1.2.2 The What, the Who, the When, the Where, the How and the Why

There are several different ways of encountering trees, or coming up with smaller questions, and using them to map out the forest, or to build out to a broader question. You may have to start with a “what” question, that is, to figure out what the thing is, how it works and who is involved before you can ask why. Linking what, how, and why can then lead you to discovering what this tree has to do with the forest.

One way to encounter a tree is to identify a gap in the research in your field. Here are some examples of the gaps we saw when we were starting out. When Québec passed a law in 1977 that said French must be the language of work, most research on language policy focused on investigating the policy documents, or used survey data, but no one looked at what actually was happening in the process of implementation: did people actually speak French and only French in the workplace? How did language choice actually happen? Similarly in Catalonia, during the 1980s, people investigated language proficiency using large-scale self-report data, but did not look at what people actually did. Sari saw that much attention had been paid to legal and political definitions and debates about Sámi indigenous rights, but not so much to how they affected people’s lives or how people made sense of these debates. Such gaps are not only interesting just because we can fill them. It is also productive to ask oneself why there is a gap at all: what were the interests of those who set up the previous research agenda? Are some issues taboo for some stakeholders? Are some issues methodologically easier to address? These questions may well help you significantly in establishing your position and justifying it.

A second way to find trees is to notice a puzzle: something regularly happening around you that seems odd, mysterious or different, and that you want to describe and explain. For description, the question is “what?” One good example from our own experience is when, later in our careers, minority communities started getting involved in heritage tourism. Monica sees an ad for French-language summer theatre in an area that has never had tourism or any kind of cultural industry: what is the theatre, what is the play? Joan notices an old house in a small town has been turned into a museum honouring a 19th century Catalan literary figure: what kind of a museum is it? Sari notices a new crafts store has opened up in the Sámi village she has been working in: what kind of store exactly is it? From there you can get to the “why” questions. For all three cases, such a question could be formulated like this: Why would a linguistic minority region, defined as such in political terms, and long devoted centrally to fighting for political rights, shift its attention away from politics and towards economic development—and in particular, of all the economic activities one could potentially imagine, why would they invest in heritage tourism?

However, on its own, a question like why a linguistic minority region is investing in tourism is not terribly important or interesting. Nor is why some schoolchildren speak French or English in some playground in Canada, or why some people answer in Spanish when spoken to in Catalan, or why Sámi journalists carefully think about how to deal with Finnish-speaking interviewees in a radio program. The “why” question in itself can be very abstract or vague if we do not deploy it through the details of who, where, when and how. Put differently, to figure out what forest these trees are part of, you need to ask questions which lead out to the trajectories of the people, the place and the resources involved. The goal is to describe what the phenomenon is, who participates, how things work, and why all this is happening. What kind of tourism are we talking about? When and how did this particular minority region invest in tourism? How did it get started? What are the tensions and strategies around this development? Are there people who always speak Spanish no matter what, or does everyone use Catalan sometimes? Who does what? What happens when they do? Is Joan the only person who cares about this or is there a broader debate involving lots of different kinds of people with different opinions? When did Sámi media get started? What are its goals? Who wants to work in that field? Who funds it? What audience does it reach? What do they think of it?

Finally, no matter what your way into the topic is, one of the challenges in formulating research questions is figuring out what the right level and scope are. What questions are too narrow to yield any interesting insight on anything that matters; what questions are so broad that no human being, nor even a team of human beings, could ever hope to answer them? Here we would like to suggest that the goal is to figure out the linkages between the narrow and the broad, and to construct your actual research project around the feasible.

In this context, feasible means that your research is manageable and “do-able” within the normal constraints that you will experience, such as access to the data, time constraints, skills you may need or any ethical or safety considerations. It is also connected to your own position: how people read you, where they think you belong, what your networks are, and what re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 First Key Moment: Formulating Your Research Question
• 2 Second Key Moment: Designing Your Research
• 3 Third Key Moment: Generating your Data
• 4 Fourth Key Moment: Analyzing Your Data
• 5 Fifth Key Moment: Making Your Story
• 6 Shop Floor
• Epilogue
• References
• Further Reading
• Index