Linguistic Challenges of Fieldwork for First-Generation Ethnic Researchers

Introduction

In cultural and cross-cultural research fieldwork, limited linguistic accessibility between the interviewer and interviewee can cause caution. In Canadian multiculturalism, the linguistic limitation of the interviewer is an omnipresent hurdle when interviewing linguistic minority groups, which are predominated by first-generation immigrant subjects. For many first-generation Canadian immigrants from the global south, the native language tends to vary from officially bilingual Canada (i.e., French and English) (Haque, 2018). Even when the multilingual immigrant participant has access to the official language, they might feel more comfortable completing the interview in their native language. These participants might experience greater fluency without the internal gap between one’s native language and the adopted new language based on their existing cultural repertoire and perspectives (Pavlenko, 2017). Many bilingual first-generation immigrants experience a distinctive self associated with their different languages (Pavlenko, 2017).

While completing fieldwork among Iranian communities in Southern Ontario, the issue of language presented itself. Even with awareness of my bilingualism, many Iranian participants were unwilling to complete their interviews in their native language, which was most accessible to them. Choosing broken English over Farsi was a challenge as it limited the available linguistic source of communication to both parties. This paper critically reflects on this impediment, precisely as I identify as an Iranian bilingual researcher. Through this reflection, I question the researcher’s gaze and the participant’s reverse gaze. This paper aims to explain the concept of reverse gaze and investigates how the participants’ reverse gaze restructures the interviewer’s position as a researcher. This analysis also explores the effects of reverse gaze on participants’ linguistic choices, even when the researcher is a bilingual community member.

In qualitative fieldwork, the interviewer and interviewee need linguistic compatibility since any linguistic gap leads to miscommunication and missing data. In preliminary interactions between the participant and interviewer, the interviewer can assess or inquire about the most desirable and accessible language for the participants to respond accordingly. Therefore, when designing a qualitative research method to explore various ethnic communities, the foreseeable language barrier encourages discussion regarding the availability of an interpreter (Bergen, 2018), linguistically proficient research assistant, or in the case of bilingual principal investigators, their involvement during data collection. While having an interpreter present is beneficial, the researcher’s capability of speaking the same language as the participant is the most reasonable solution to limit any linguistic barriers. Thus, in theory, the assumption of the researcher’s ability to speak and understand the participant’s first language ensures the accuracy of the findings. This research, however, posed many questions regarding the interviewer’s linguistic abilities and the willingness of the participants.

Research Background

This paper critically reflects on my doctorate research fieldwork experience, which took place in the winter of 2016 and spring of 2017. The research investigated the political climate of the Iranian diasporas living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and York Region (YR), measured through the Iranian immigrants’ relationship with the three Iranian flags, each with historical and social specificity for the Iranian diasporic communities. I explored the Iranian diaspora’s interpretive experience with the politically charged multiplicity of Iranian flags exhibited in Canada. The first flag represented the pre-Islamic revolution Iran, and the second flag represented the post-Islamic revolution Iran. The third flag, which has no ensigns, has historical significance as the flag of the people and provides a social value for Iranian Diasporas as an apolitical communal representation. Applying the flag and exploring the political climate among the Iranian Diaspora in GTA and YR facilitated an understanding of the group dynamic and identity development of a small yet growing ethnic minority community. The findings indicated the diversity of Iranian Diasporas and the means of negotiating identities post-migration among first- and second-generation Iranian-Canadians. The findings emphasized the diversity of the Iranian communities based on gender, religion, sexuality, immigration generation, waves of migration, etc.

My findings for this paper rely on 6 months of fieldwork among the Iranian communities residing in GTA and YR and a series of semi-structured interviews. Using snowball and convenience sampling, I invited willing Iranian participants residing in GTA and YR for interviews. The sampling was completed with the help of friends and acquaintances who were members of Iranian communities in those two regions. I interviewed a total of 27 Iranian-Canadians from diverse gender, sexual orientation, religion, and socio-cultural backgrounds. I planned my fieldwork in consideration with recent scholarly works, and thus felt prepared for anticipated challenges, such as building rapport, time management, getting access to the gatekeeper and other obstacles experienced by other qualitative scholars (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007; Van den Hoonaard, 2012). Despite my role as the Principal Investigator with bilingual capabilities, my fieldwork experienced an unexpected linguistic challenge during the data collection process. This challenge led to an inability to build a strong linguistic rapport with the research participants. These linguistic challenges needed my dire attention, as the validity of the research results depended on them.

As a 1.25-generation immigrant and bilingual ethnic researcher exploring my ethnic communities, I noticed a theoretical gap regarding linguistic challenges in the qualitative research method. I migrated to Canada as an adolescent who had reasonable access to Farsi before migration and managed to learn English early on in my life. Similar to many 1.25-generation immigrants, I have cultural and linguistic access to my ethnic and dominant Canadian cultures (Venturin, 2019). While I had linguistic access to my Iranian community, many participants who were aware of my bilingual abilities chose to express themselves in broken and simplified English. The puzzling experience (Souaiaia, 2021) led me to revisit and investigate the underlying reason for the challenges encountered during interactions with community members. I reassessed my methodological approaches to critically reflect on my fieldwork challenge. With the 1.5 and the 1.25 generation (the foreign-born who immigrated as children or adolescents)- and second-generation immigrants (the Canadian born with immigrant parents) increasingly entering academia, there is a likelihood of an influx of emerging scholars who are fluent in English and/or French, as well as the allophone language spoken by their immigrant parents. The reflection on these challenges suggests a linguistic pattern that other first-generation bilingual immigrant researchers could also experience.

During the data collection process, I realized my linguistic proficiencies in the participants’ language did not accommodate me. I encountered participants unwilling to speak their native communal language, even when they experienced frustration with English. To ensure participant linguistic capabilities, during preliminary meetings, my participant and I chatted in our native language to settle. However, with the mention of the first question, some participants refused to complete the interview in their ethnic language. While for some, the refusal was a reasonable choice as English was more accessible to them based on their fluency, for others, this refusal affected the way they expressed themselves. This linguistic gap was an unexpected challenge, as it didn’t reveal itself during the pre-test, and there were not many scholarly works that addressed this linguistic problem. Based on my existing literature review, none of the cross-cultural scholars addressed such linguistic challenges, and therefore, it was a surprising situation for me. While fluency in both languages is an asset during the interviewing process, in this unique case for me as an emerging ethnic minority scholar, bilingualism backfired. This challenge appears to be a new phenomenon that negatively affected my findings during the research’s qualitative data collection. To further understand the linguistic challenges in the fieldwork, it is essential to explore the existing literature for further investigation before discussing the research’s fieldwork techniques and shortcomings.

Cultural and Cross-cultural Research Challenges

In qualitative research, unforeseen challenges are anticipated due to the interactive nature of the fieldwork with human subjects. Each qualitative research fieldwork reveals new sets of challenges due to human subjects’ use of language, which is culturally and politically affiliated, and continuously negotiated based on their audience (Charalambous et al., 2021). Therefore, fieldwork obstacles vary based on the diversity of social groups’ normative values and their interaction with the dominant discourses, which effectively alter their social expectations (Charalambous et al., 2021). Many qualitative research scholars revisit and explore their experiences in the field to address their challenges and their approach to those obstacles.

In a preliminary review of qualitative scholarly works, specific themes are recurring, including time management, getting access, managing gatekeepers, building rapport, and other similar interactive constraints (Dickson-Swift et al., 2007; Van den Hoonaard, 2012). These interactive challenges vary in different social groups; Therefore, when investigating the minority status participants, especially immigrants and those with limited access to the dominant language, the research introduces a new set of challenges, both culturally and linguistically (Charalambous et al., 2021). Banerjee and Sowards (2020) state that managing communicational challenges has become an essential part of cross-cultural and translational research. Cross-cultural research entails a technical, cultural, and social gap between the participant and researcher, which can lead to ethical dilemmas. The two authors are multilingual, and their ability benefits their international and translational research. While indicating the linguistic challenges and fieldwork privileges and shortcomings, this paper and similar scholarly works (Turnbull, 2018; Vähäsantanen & Saarinen, 2013; Osanami Törngren & Nge, 2018) explore the hierarchical relationship between the participant and researcher when there are linguistic limitations for first-generation immigrants and ethnic minority community members.

Challenges in Studying the Iranian Diaspora: My Personal Experience as a Bilingual Researcher

Assessment and Re-Evaluation

Upon assessing my technique, I noticed my assumption and my shortcomings based on those assumptions. I argue that while I am ethnically and racially a member of the Iranian diaspora, I continue to bear the gaze of a researcher from a different social and educational stratum (Lund et al., 2016). Due to my preconceived ethnic identity, I failed to acknowledge my participants’ perception of my positionality and location of power before entering the field. While I was employing the post-colonial feminist approach to limit my hierarchy, my participants continued to notice my existing hierarchical location of power. While I had access to the community’s language and understood the community’s code of conduct, I was unable to gain their trust and to establish rapport (Fontana and Frey, 2010, 655) because I was in an asymmetrical relationship as a researcher with my participants (Osanami Törngren & Nge, 2018), even though I assumed my ethnicity would surpass that hierarchical relationship.

I re-evaluated my interview techniques to assess my shortcomings. I attended each interview with my question guide and Letter of Informed (LOI) consent approved by McMaster University’s Research Ethics Board. The presented document alone was a cultural breach, which created a linguistic hierarchy by introducing the Canadian educational institutions as the dominant habitus. While during each interview, I instigated the interaction with Farsi as the preferable language, the English language of the consent forms and its social connection with Canadian higher educational institutions transformed my identity. The participants perceived the chat as a communal experience, but the interview was part of the dominant discourse. Therefore, it shifted the general atmosphere of the interview’s communal interaction. While I aimed to establish my communal social location by setting communal boundaries, the participants did not perceive me as an average community member. I was an outsider, and my participants using the reverse gaze situated my position during the interviews. While I was under the assumption that my communal relations would limit my hierarchical location, my participants reconstructed and maintained the hierarchical boundaries of interviewing through their reverse gaze. The participant’s reversed gaze assigned my role as an outsider with a distinct social hierarchy as an investigator during the interviewing process. When exploring the interviewer’s gaze, many scholars failed to discuss the participant’s active involvement in restructuring and allocating the power imbalance during the interview process.

My self-perception as a researcher did not align with my participants’ (Fontana & Frey, 2010) perceptions of me when entering the field. I did not self-identify as a cross-cultural researcher during fieldwork, but my participant allocated that role to me. Therefore, my participants did not see these interviews as a communal experience but rather an intercommunal experience to share their silenced narratives. For many of the respondents, the interview experience was participating in an Anglophone encounter with higher education, and they attempted to express their account in a way that provided them with a sense of connection. I argue that the rejection of ethnic language was an act of empowerment by imposing salient linguistic borders to create a sense of belonging with the dominant discourse (Anthias, 2020). As Anthias (ibid) argues, belonging is both fixed and fluid, creating different conditions for different groups. While Anthias discusses the concept of belonging from a transnational perspective of the phenomenon, I believe her analysis relates to this discussion. The hyper-communal experience questions the research participant’s sense of belonging in the dominant culture. I needed to acknowledge the gap between my self-perception and the community’s perception of me. The public meeting places and ethics documents in English encouraged the colonial Anglo-culture to intrude on this ethnic experience. To build a rapport with the participants for the deep discussion, I Acker, 2001 had to actively restructure my approach to create an ethnic, communal experience.

I acknowledged the linguistic challenges as a cross-cultural issue of belonging and imbalance of social hierarchy; therefore, I consciously took the initiative to establish the interviewing environment as a communal environment to be accessible to the community’s needs. While building on my existing post-colonial feminist approach, I acknowledged the reverse gaze of my participants to create an experience that was related to communities’ ethnic identity. I realized that, in order to build rapport with interview participants, my identity as a researcher has to be secondary to my identity as a community member. I became flexible regarding the interview location because some participants felt comfortable at their place of residence as a host rather than as interview subjects. I was invited into the community’s safe space by introducing the interview into the private sphere.

Before the short chat and settling in, I presented the participants with the LOI consent form. My first task was to explain the ethics forms and ask for the participants’ signatures. I clearly explained the LOI’s significance for respondents’ welfare and security but simultaneously separated the interviewing atmosphere from the required legal documentation to actively maintain the communal experience of the interview. After signing the LOI forms, I started the initiating chats about life and Persian pleasantries to ease in. I memorized each question, and while chatting, I conversationally introduced each question about the interviewee’s experience with the flag and the Iranian community’s dominant discourse, using the colloquial language and cultural cues to become an insider. The separation of paperwork and use of colloquial language and cultural cues were crucial in minimizing the hierarchical gap, as we were no longer in an interview setting. We were discussing a political debate regarding our ethnic community within the communal setting. While posing the questions for clarification and relatability, I provided each interviewee with full agency over the interview’s trajectory, which positioned the participant as the expert and further minimized my position of power. Many responded positively to this approach, as they revealed the most intimate details of their experience as an immigrant, of which I was privileged to be a part. By minimizing the status difference and the general empirical hierarchy between the interviewer and interviewee (Fontana and Frey, 2010, 658), I aimed to build rapport with each participant.

With the new sense of belonging and blurred boundaries in the ethnic atmosphere, many participants felt comfortable and started to speak in Farsi to express themselves. While the discussion wandered off from the main topic, their accounts produced richer and more valid data. With the limited intrusion of the dominant language (i.e., English) and interviewees’ volition to direct the interviews, many interviewees felt confident enough to disclose private and personal accounts of their experiences in the diasporas, which created an emotional bond between us and provided me with a fertile and insightful narrative of each account. The emotional bond helped me understand each participant’s experience in diasporas and their interpretation of each flag.

Recommendations and Suggestions

Based on my existing research experience, for future researchers, who might have a similar conundrum, it is important to consider and evaluate the position of power as an academic researcher first, and a community member second. For the 1.5-, 1.25-, and second-generation immigrants with bilingual abilities, it is important to actively acknowledge the hierarchical position as a researcher within one’s ethnic community, because the community members might perceive the researcher as an outsider. Through active acknowledgement of one’s social status, the researcher can address their communal shortcomings based on their community’s socio-cultural expectations and readjust based on the needs of the group. In this research, I narrowed down the gap by limiting English language intrusion and the use of culturally appropriate and colloquial Farsi language to express my communal connection. I actively re-evaluated the interview power imbalance and encouraged the participant to direct the interviewing trajectory. The interview was no longer a hierarchical question and answer between the interviewer and the interviewee; instead, it was a collaborative experience between two community members.

Conclusion

The interviewer’s ethnic connection to the community does not guarantee a cultural fieldwork experience. The fieldwork remains cross-cultural experience, and similar to any cross-cultural research, language remains an inescapable intruding challenge. Therefore, my position as a bilingual Iranian-Canadian researcher might benefit my data collection process, but I was expected to acknowledge my cross-cultural position as a researcher actively. While I did not identify myself as a cross-cultural researcher, my participants allocated that position on me. The Iranian community perceived me as a researcher first and a community member second. Therefore, cross-cultural linguistic challenges became prevalent in this research. The participants were unwilling to speak in the most comfortable language for them. My social positionality as a researcher and the use of English made the experience inaccessible to my ethnic community. By revisiting my fieldwork experience, I aim to explore the unexpected linguistic challenges experienced by bilingual ethnic immigrant researchers, especially with the growing 1.5-, 1.25-, and second-generation immigrant researchers who have bilingual abilities but lack the proper training to utilize it.