Stephen Lucek is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Education at University College Dublin. His research focuses on linguistic competencies and resources of language users in Ireland. This extends to multilingualism, register variation, and polydialectalism. His latest project examines teenage language use and attitudes within the framework of Standard Language Ideology. Previous to this project, Stephen has written about Irish English from a number of different perspectives. He worked with Perceptual Dialectology methods and GIS modelling to produce highly detailed maps of dialect areas in Ireland with Vicky Garnett. He has also examined the conceptual variation of space and how Conceptual Metaphor Theory can be used to explain linguistic variations that are otherwise opaque. Stephen was recently a co-editor of TEANGA: The Journal of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics. This journal highlights the best of Irish research on language as well as presenting international perspectives on language use, multilingualism, and language policy.
Can you tell me a little bit about your research and your data collection efforts currently?
I work with Irish English primarily, from a sociolinguistic perspective. I have experience working with mainly adults through my PhD, which was focused on a cognitive sociolinguistic study of space in Irish English. Currently, I’m looking at adolescent language use both from the linguistic perspective and from an action research perspective. In other words, I’m looking at linguistic discrimination, how it manifests in society more widely, but also how it affects teenagers and how they view themselves, their language use, and the varieties of English in Ireland. That has been obviously challenging to do at the present time. I was nearly finished with the field work. I had gone into six schools in total, completed five of them, and I just had to do a focus group and perceptual dialectology exercises with the final group of students when the announcements came in March 2020 that schools were closing, and that basically Ireland was closing. Similar to so many of my colleagues, I had to rethink how I was going to do that work. Unfortunately, the school I was working with is in a socio-economically disadvantaged area and they couldn’t really guarantee that any of the students would engage with an online focus group. I had to hang on until October last year to finish that work with the students. From a personal perspective, it was some of the hardest times, up there with the later stages of the PhD. Not knowing what was gonna happen day to day, week to week, as I’m sure so many of our colleagues have as well. It’s not the most conducive area or space for conducting interviews. I’ve done it and it’s been fine, but it’s been difficult to get to that natural place where you can get unguarded language. You have your tricks for circumventing the Observer’s Paradox. We’re trained to do these things face-to-face, so it’s been different. Though there are loads of people that I know in different disciplines, in education for example, who work with young people and they routinely do their work online so that’s not as much of a barrier to overcome.
Can you talk more about the kinds of data that you are collecting online at the moment?
I did a one-to-one interview with a school principal. It was fine, it took longer to transcribe because there were lots and lots of gaps where neither one of was speaking. It’s just less relaxed for the participant, I’m sure, and for me or for other sociolinguists. I also tried to focus on different types of research that I could do while human participants were unwilling to or capable of being participants to interviews. I did a lot of corpus work with ICE corpora, some English language stuff. BYU corpora, News on the Web and GLOBE. I’m looking at language attitudes and attitudes to migration. How they’re linked, how they’re indicative of one another, how they can work together against each other. And the idea I immediately had was ‘let’s go do a pilot study, do a bit of random anonymized interviews’ and try to get at something tangible, because there’s great data out there from the European Social Survey (ESS), who graciously make all their data available. That survey shows what Europeans are willing to say to interviewers about what they think of people coming into their country who are quite similar to them culturally or quite different to them culturally, etc, etc, all these different metrics. But, I don’t always think that that format is indicative of how everyday people conduct their lives, right? So, COVID-19 showed us that it’s very easy to get past the surface of far-right ideologies into the more widespread crackpot of far-right inclinations. Mask wearing and lockdown orders were very much an opening for these types of groups. So, they were able to use the wedge issue of ‘your civil liberties are being limited, you’re not being allowed to live your life the way you want to because of this virus, oh by the way, this virus is imported, it’s from somewhere else’. And these narratives fester in online communities, so I was able to get through, with a research assistant that I was able to hire, a fairly in-depth Twitter scrape of what people were saying about COVID and other attitudes. What we found runs contrary to a working paper that came out in the autumn by some of the people who run the ESS, who said that in their data gathering in Germany there was no major effect by lockdown, by the pandemic. Our data is not agreeing with what they’re finding in face-to-face interviews. Maybe this was the opportunity that we needed as researchers to find this data that’s been facilitated by the increased attention that’s been put on outsiders.
What has your experience been so far with adjusting to the remote or online data collection?
Well, the first noticeable factor was that it had to be considerably shorter based on the participants’ screen fatigue. I think I got forty minutes out of one participant, while other interviews went probably for an hour and a half or so, with ten to twenty minutes before the recording started up. My inclination was that it was less natural, and far more guarded, even though there was the advantage of the fact that this person was in their home rather than being in the school. So, ostensibly that should have been a more natural environment for them, but the computer-mediated discourse affected it in some way. I got what I could out of it, and it was fine, but when you don’t have a huge data set, okay interviews are a little bit more noticeable and things you probably focus on a bit more when you’re doing your post-hoc analysis. But it is what it is. The focus group with the students was fine, because I got to do it in-person. The interview was done through face masks, but that was fine, and I was perfectly happy for that to be a very small barrier. I think the students themselves weren’t that affected by everything that was going on, but it was definitely a topic of conversation and something that came up repeatedly during the interview. I don’t think they were any more or less guarded, teenagers tend to be a bit aloof at the best of times. So, I don’t think I could have done the focus group with them online. So much of the great data comes from the crosstalk and the overlapping discourse, so that wouldn’t have happened in an online environment. It’s impossible to do that.
On the basis of your experience so far, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the fact that we’ve been in some way forced into remote data collection?
I think we’re incredibly fortunate that it’s happened now and not forty years ago, when massive online corpora or the very easy access people have to social media weren’t a thing. You wear two hats when you think about this as a social scientist and as a parent, sibling or a child of someone who could potentially be a user of these social networks. The social scientist loves the fact that you get this very unfiltered data that’s freely, naturally occurring as naturally occurring can be. There is a real need to temper any positivity but also lift any negativity. So, the positive aspects are obviously what I’ve just mentioned about freely available or relatively freely available data that can be really rich in vernacular use. At the same time, the ability to focus an interview, or to guide an interview properly, is just not feasible with found data. But at the same time you can find what you’re looking for. It’s just a different perspective. As much as I enjoy doing work with corpora, or using historical databases, I’m really interested in synchronous language variation and the leading edges of language change, so though it’s possible to get these data, they may be a little less reliable, because so many factors are questionable when you’ve got your data in an unguided way or maybe in a corpus-driven way. And obviously, there’s tons and tons of questions over ethics and reusability.
How do you go about the ethical use of Twitter data?
There are a lot of considerations to be considered. It’s definitely a challenge, and it’s something that as a discipline, linguistics or even wider social sciences aren’t really doing a great job of fully addressing. I don’t know who has to lead on this, if it’s researchers, if it’s professional organizations, if it’s publishers, if it’s the APA. Eventually someone will put down in writing ‘this is how we’re supposed to do it and if you don’t follow these conventions, it’s not above board’. In the meantime, I’m going to try to avoid it as much as possible, with relying on quantity more than quality.
How was it dealing with university research ethics approval in the context of collecting data online?
The university basically recommended that we use our judgment and fair questions, we could bring them to the research ethics board. Working with my research mentor, we came to the conclusion that there are just too many external factors that we cannot guarantee, such as making sure there’s nobody else in the room. Which is less of a factor but something you can mitigate in face to face interviews. So, as a researcher, I felt that when in doubt I’d have to side on the point of view of protecting participants as much as possible, and not risking any kind of identification, you know. A bit over-cautious probably, but I would rather stand over that than have to figure out how things went wrong in a different way.
How do you see linguistic research developing over the next five years? Do you see things going back to normal completely, or do you think this is going to have lasting consequences on how we conduct research?
As an optimist, I try not to think of the loss happening through papers that weren’t written, studies that weren’t completed, the increased burden of primarily female colleagues in child-minding and raising children in this unique environment. I would like to think that after five to ten years, a lot of that slowdown will have been alleviated, or we’ll be able to get back to the way we’re used to conducting fieldwork. That work still has to be done face-to-face, that still has to be done in a very controlled environment. Anyone who works with children, we can’t just digitize the younger generations and expect not to change the way they learn or the way they interact. And for people that work like us, we get such a buzz from talking to people and recording our conversations with research participants who are telling us something valuable, something they don’t tell other people, something they don’t get to talk about every day. And I think that’s not going away for people our age, people who have already started their careers. We’re always going to want to try to do something like that, if we’re doing it already. We have plenty of colleagues who are used to working with historical corpora, they’re used to working with literature, used to working with computer-mediated discourse, they’re used to working with naturally occurring data that is not derived from interviews. So, there is plenty of stuff out there for them to do. And maybe those are the growth fields. Maybe some researchers who would have gone towards conducting ethnographies, going out and doing very careful, slow, deliberate work, will have their head turned by a massive corpus and say ‘hey, hang on a second, this is amazing, you can see all these syntactic patterns emerging over time.’ Maybe they will lead the language variation and change crowd. There is certainly something to be said about, you know, being interdisciplinary, even within linguistics. So, I think that if it’s going to be beneficial to the way we do research, a lot of us will find new ways of working. But obviously there are huge financial problems to be overcome as well. And that might lose us half or three quarters of a generation of researchers, so that’s a huge problem and it’s something that there doesn’t seem to be an escape plan for. There isn’t a path towards finding and recognizing talented researchers who have no other way of supporting themselves but by getting work with a research council, with a grant, with a university. So it’s questionable.