Linguists and language workers

In this paper, I address two connected topics: firstly, the relationships between linguists working in academia and language professionals, such as communication managers and consultants, in other sectors; and secondly, how a strong emphasis on knowledge exchange and impact in British higher education policy has led to increased collaboration between academic and non-academic language workers, but also to a realignment of traditional academic values with the interests of practitioners. The investigation is partly based on published reflections – mostly by linguists – on collaborating with (language) professionals in other sectors, and partly on insights from 13 interviews with language workers in consulting, communications and campaigning. The interviews are manually analysed for thematic categories and, where relevant, for pragmatic meanings in the context of the interview situation and conversational interaction. Findings suggest conflicts around registers and timescales, along with concerns over data and the relevance of academic interests. Crucially, language professionals show little concern about collaborating with academics, leading to an imbalance in interests. I supplement the evidence with personal observations on the opportunities and obstacles that are present when straddling academic and non-academic work, as well as with a discussion of how a unidirectional realignment of values changes the nature of academic work.

Interview as Social Practice: How Can Nexus Analysis Enhance Reflexivity?

This article suggests that the understanding of an interview as a social practice can be enhanced by the notion of social action mediated by language and material tools as proposed in nexus analysis methodology. Interviews can be viewed either as a source of gathering information or social practice. The latter approach advocates for a greater sense of reflexivity about the interview situation. This article suggests that nexus analysis methodology can help concretize the greater reflexivity about interactional resources of an interview in different ways. One such way is to explore how parties in an interview interaction use material places to bring out discourses that may otherwise not have been triggered if conventional qualitative interview approaches were used. This is illustrated with interviews about the impact of gold mining on human well-being in the Ahafo Region of Ghana, carried out on a gold mining site. This article concludes that paying attention to the interview site has an unrealized potential to strengthen the reflexivity about the interview situation.

What’s in a name? Identity, indexicality and name-change in an immigrant context

The present study explores the case of a transnational Polish family in Norway in which one of the care givers as well as the teenage son underwent a name change after their initial experiences of migration. Drawing on the audio-recorded interactions in the interview situation, the article investigates the identity constructions of the focal participant in his narrative about the name change. To this end, first, the indexicalities of the social identity category Pole as constructed in Norwegian media and the participants’ accounts are outlined. Then, against this backdrop, the focal participant’s identity claims as occasioned in the narrative on the name change are discursively analyzed. The analysis shows that the identity claims the focal participant makes aim at dissociating himself from the powerless, stigmatized position of a migrant, in which he was cast upon his arrival in Norway. Furthermore, the study suggests that migrant identity constructions need to be considered against the participants’ lived experiences of migration, larger societal discourses and against participants’ constructions of belonging to imagined communities.

Shifting Identities, Policy Networks, and the Practical and Ethical Challenges of Gaining Access to the Field in Interventions

This chapter explains interviews as an illustrative example of the effects that a violent or illiberal context can have on how informants or interviewees are accessed. It points out that what is shared in an interview is influenced in particular ways by certain contexts and on meta-data in interviews about war and mass violence. The chapter focuses on Roland Kostić, who shows how interviewing intervention elites brings about its own series of challenges and dilemmas. It discusses Kostić's interview-based research with international intervention elites in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It also shows how long-term research is crucial for opening the door to elite networks in a way that has allowed for behind-the-scene insights and information that are far beyond a formal expert interview situation.

The Challenges of Including Patients With Aphasia in Qualitative Research for Health Service Redesign: Qualitative Interview Study

Background Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. Aphasia is a frequent complication of stroke and is a major disability for patients and their families. The provision of services for stroke patients differs across health care providers and regions, and strategies directed at improving these services have benefited from the involvement of patients. However, patients with aphasia are often excluded from these co-design activities due to a diminished capacity to communicate verbally and a lack of health researcher experience in working with patients with aphasia. Objective The primary aim of this paper is to identify approaches appropriate for working with patients with aphasia in an interview situation and, more generally, determine the importance of including people with aphasia in health service improvement research. The secondary aim is to describe the experiences of researchers involved in interviewing patients with aphasia. Methods A total of 5 poststroke patients with aphasia participated in face-to-face interviews in their homes to gain insight into their in-hospital experience following their stroke. Interviews were audio-recorded, and thematic analysis was performed. The experiences of the researchers interviewing these patients were informally recorded postinterview, and themes were derived from these reflections. Results The interview technique utilized in this study was unsuitable to gain rich, qualitative data from patients with aphasia. The experience of researchers performing these interviews suggests that preparation, emotion, and understanding were three of the main factors influencing their ability to gather useful experiential information from patients with aphasia. Patients with aphasia are valuable contributors to qualitative health services research, and researchers need to be flexible and adaptable in their methods of engagement. Conclusions Including patients with aphasia in health service redesign research requires the use of nontraditional interview techniques. Researchers intending to engage patients with aphasia must devise appropriate strategies and methods to maximize the contributions and valuable communications of these participants.

(Un-)Sicherheit, (In-)Konsistenz und vielerlei Maß

This paper deals with normative statements in interviews concerning the use of languages and varieties in university. A corpus of 123 interviews with teachers, students and administrative staff was used to investigate within an interactional approach the relation between the form of normative statements, the norms they refer to and the interactional situation in the interviews. This article shows by means of three exemplary analyses that the expression of normative expectations / evaluations is highly dependent not only on the validity, salience and effectiveness of the norms in question, but also on the interview situation itself. Seen as a social practice and not just as an instrument of elicitating attitudes and other metalinguistic data, the interview becomes a showcase of the interconnection of normative phenomena (norms, values, attitudes …), normative conflicts and their negotiation.

Gender-of-interviewer Effects in Self-reported Gender Ideologies – Evidence Based on Interviewer Change in a Panel Survey

Previous research has largely overlooked whether and to what extent the observed variation in gender ideologies depends on the interviewer. This study examines gender-of-interviewer effects in gender ideologies among respondents, interviewed by different interviewers in multiple waves of a large-scale panel survey in Germany. By applying fixed-effects models to data from the adult cohort of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), the study finds that respondents report more egalitarian views to female interviewers. While gender-of-interviewer effects were more pronounced for men, in West Germany, and for egalitarian slanted attitude items, further effect heterogeneity seemed to be relatively low for respondents’ characteristics. The results illustrate the influence of the interview situation on sensitive questions and their methodological consideration in further research.

Assessing the stability of egocentric networks over time using the digital participant-aided sociogram tool Network Canvas

This paper examines the stability of egocentric networks as reported over time using a novel touchscreen-based participant-aided sociogram. Past work has noted the instability of nominated network alters, with a large proportion leaving and reappearing between interview observations. To explain this instability of networks over time, researchers often look to structural embeddedness, namely the notion that alters are connected to other alters within egocentric networks. Recent research has also asked whether the interview situation itself may play a role in conditioning respondents to what might be the appropriate size and shape of a social network, and thereby which alters ought to be nominated or not. We report on change in these networks across three waves and assess whether this change appears to be the result of natural churn in the network or whether changes might be the result of factors in the interview itself, particularly anchoring and motivated underreporting. Our results indicate little change in average network size across waves, particularly for indirect tie nominations. Slight, significant changes were noted between waves one and two particularly among those with the largest networks. Almost no significant differences were observed between waves two and three, either in terms of network size, composition, or density. Data come from three waves of a Chicago-based panel study of young men who have sex with men.

Til forsvar for kvalitative intervju

To kritikker fra prominente sosiologer har de siste årene dratt i tvil nytten av kvalitative intervjudata for å si noe pålitelig om sosiale praksiser utenfor intervjusituasjonen. Den ene tar utgangspunkt i at folk ikke alltid handler slik de sier at de gjør, den andre kritikken i at folk ikke har diskursiv tilgang til sin praktiske kunnskap. Kritikkene impliserer at alt av intervjudata må behandles som fordreide av informantenes holdninger eller misoppfatninger. Kritikkene innebærer også en antakelse om at intervjudata ikke blir analysert med noen distanse til informantenes holdninger. Jeg mener at både implikasjonen og antakelsen er urimelige, og vil svare på dem med å dra fram tre teknikker som forskere som benytter seg av intervju ofte bruker: sammenligning, leting etter flere indikatorer og vurderinger av sammenheng med tidligere forskning. Ved blant annet å bruke disse teknikkene i analysen av intervjudata kan forskere dra valide konklusjoner også om forhold utenfor intervjusituasjonen. ENGELSK ABSTRACT Eivind Grip Fjær: In defense of qualitative interviews In recent years several prominent sociologists have argued that qualitative interviews are inadequate for making valid claims about social practices outside of the interview situation. One critique is based on the distinction between what people do and what they say they do, another on theories arguing that people do not have discursive access to their practical knowledge. These critiques imply that researchers should treat all interview data as distorted by informants’ attitudes and misunderstandings. They also rest on the assumption that interview data analysis lacks distance to informants’ attitudes. I argue that both the implication and the assumption are unreasonable, and will reply to them by pointing to three techniques commonly applied by researchers who use interview data: comparison, search for multiple indicators, and evaluation of consistency with previous research. In part by using these techniques in their analysis of interview data, researchers are able to make valid claims about practices outside of the interview situation. Keywords: Interview, qualitative method, action, attitude.

Insider or outsider? Issues of power and habitus during life history interviews with menopausal Iranian women

Conducting my fieldwork among religious menopausal women in Iran raised the question of the position of the researcher in life history research. This chapter set out to reflect on the shifting power dynamics in life history interviews and argues for the need to go beyond a focus on intersectional categories per se, to look at the broader social landscape of power and its process. I do this by employing a Bourdieusian perspective, which considers the symbolic and cognitive elements by emphasising on the social practice. So, I emphasise the power dynamic within the interviews could not be explained only by identity categories and how they intersected, but needed to include how the actors deployed them in their social practice i.e. in the interview situation.