Researcher Linguistic Vulnerability
While the project collected and analyzed quantitative data, Phd-candidate Ashley Muller was motivated by qualitative inquiry’s commitment to reducing participant–researcher distance and power differences.
Despite multiple sources of power imbalances favoring the researcher, the ability of participants to speak their native language to a nonnative researcher, and the researcher’s active recognition of her linguistic vulnerability, appeared to afford them an unexpected source of power within the context of the project.
Methodological implications
Experience from study suggests that even in the context of quantitative data collection, researcher linguistic vulnerability may be of benefit for marginalized participants.
A lack of fluency on the part of the researcher need not be a hindrance to empowering research—but an argument for the cultural mobility of researchers and those interested in cross-cultural research.
For research participants, contact with nonnative-speaking researchers who identify their language levels as vulnerabilities and as indicative of a certain level of outsiderness can provide a much-needed source of power. Particularly for those who enter a research project burdened by additional power imbalances of being patients, physically ill, mentally ill, and socially marginalized, as within the substance use disorder treatment field.
In a mobile and globalized research world, inviting researchers who have not fluently mastered the language of their participants could increase cultural diversity in research and contribute toward the empowerment of marginalized participants.
The article was written together with Erika Gubrium, Head of Research at the Department of Social Work, Child Welfare and Social Policy at the Oslo and Akershus University College, and is published in Qualitative Health Research.
You can read the full-text article here.