Using IPA to Explore Multilingual Lived Experience and Identity: A Reflection on Methodological Issues

Abstract

This paper provides a personal reflection on methodological issues in terms of data collection and analysis using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore ethnic minority (Mongol-Chinese) students’ multilingual lived experience and their identity construction in language learning and practice. IPA, as a contemporary qualitative methodology, has developed quickly in psychology and other fields of social science, but it gets limited attention and practice in investigating how ethnic minority students negotiate their identities in multilingual education. Mongol-Chinese speakers as the target participants were interviewed online to share their subjective language learning experiences and perspectives on identity construction and negotiation. By reflecting on my doctoral journey in data collection and analysis, this paper aims to share my personal experience (concerns and solutions) in terms of the multilingual and ethical challenges that arise in this IPA project. It also intends to show the potential of IPA to explore students’ language learning experiences and beyond.

Keywords

interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA)ethnic multilingualism qualitative research researching multilingually ethical issues

Introduction

This paper offers a personal reflection on the multilingual and ethical challenges during the data collection and analysis stage of my PhD project. My doctoral study aims to examine ethnic minority (Mongol-Chinese) students’ multiple language (Mongolian as L1, Mandarin as L2, English as L3) learning experiences and their identity construction, under the multilingual context of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) of China. As China is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural country, the research on language education of China should have a more specific focus. There are 55 ethnic groups recognized as ethnic minorities, while the Han Chinese as the majority group account for 91.1%¹ in China. The IMAR is located in the north of China, bordering the countries of Mongolia and Russia. For school-aged Mongol-Chinese children, they can enrol in either an ethnic multilingual school or a Han mainstream school where Mandarin is the main medium of instruction. For those who attend ethnic multilingual school, (traditional) Mongolian as their heritage language plays an important role in the school curriculum, but they also learn Mandarin as their L2 and English as L3 as required courses from the primary school level (see Dong et al., 2015; Yi & Adamson, 2017).

As language and identity have been considered ultimately inseparable (Edwards, 2009), learners may consider the role of language and identity in this specific trilingual context, involving issues of nation and ethnicity. Their identity (as Mongol and Chinese) also influences their ‘investment’ in language learning (Norton & Toohey, 2011). Although there is some research focusing on Mongol-Chinese trilingual learners, such as Asihan 阿斯罕, 2015; Wang 王媛媛, 2019, ethnic minority students’ multiple language learning experience and language-related identity (re)construction is relatively under-researched. Thus, the PhD project is concerned with how ethnic minority students in China negotiate their ethnic and national identities and struggle with the dilemma of inheriting their mother tongue and acquiring new ‘linguistic capital' of more ‘powerful' languages (Mandarin and English), as well as how this influences their attitudes towards L1/L2/L3 learning. Inspired by the work of Guihen (2020) and Vicary et al. (2017), the purpose of this paper is also to share my experience of using IPA for the first time as a doctoral student and the challenges I have met, rather than explain each stage of data collection and analysis in detail.

For the following sections, I will start with the rationale of IPA in this study. In this section, I will give a brief summarization of the key features of IPA and its suitability for examining multilingual lived experiences. Following this, I will review my background and potential bias that may influence the study in the section positionality and reflectivity. After providing basic information on data collection and analysis, I also highlight some multilingual and ethical issues in my doctoral journey.

The Rationale of IPA in This Study

While many studies examine minority education in China (Dong et al., 2015; Feng, 2012; Jacob & Park, 2011; Xiang & Yenika-Agbaw, 2021; Zhang & Adamson, 2020), few studies have focused on the personal account of Mongol-Chinese students’ language learning and their identity construction as Mongol and/or Chinese. Ethnic minorities, like Mongol-Chinese, are at “China’s edge” (Bulag, 2003) who are marginalised groups in mainstream education systems and the majority Han-dominated society, and their ‘voice’ is usually neglected. Thus, when I designed my PhD project, I wanted to fill the absence of empirical research by exploring the ethnic Mongols’ personal accounts of multilingual lived experiences in the IMAR and their identity construction and negotiation in the school setting and beyond.

With a clear purpose of the research, IPA is chosen as a qualitative research methodology in this study given its concern with detailed examining of participants’ lived experiences and how participants make sense of their world (Smith & Osborn, 2008). Although IPA is not commonly used in educational research, research (e.g. Alase, 2017; Guihen, 2017; Jeong & Othman, 2016; Noon, 2018) display its potential to be a powerful and useful method in understanding teachers/students’ lived experience within educational fields. More recent studies, such as Howard et al. (2020), Howard et al. (2019, 2021), Tai (2024), and Tai and Wang (2024), also employed IPA to explore bi-/multilingual learning or translanguaging in school settings. For example, Howard et al. (2019) examine and highlight the school experiences of bilingual, autistic children in the UK via IPA. Tai (2023, 2024) adopted a triangulation approach combining Multimodal Conversation Analysis and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to analyse online tutorial data and video-stimulated-recall interviews in terms of translanguaging in multilingual classrooms. As Tai and Wang (2024) suggested, IPA enables researchers to examine “participants’ experiences on their own terms, without excessive influence from external psychological theories or the researcher’s personal biases” (p. 6). Based on the above, I believe that IPA can enhance this exploratory study by producing a highly intensive and detailed analysis of the first-person accounts of Mongol-Chinese individuals regarding their multiple language learning experiences and self-identification, which resonated with the original intention of this PhD design.

The practice of IPA is originally informed by phenomenology and hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation). From a phenomenological point of view, doing research is committed to thinking about the way we experience the world (Van Manen, 2016). IPA takes people as “experiencing subject”, and focuses on the “person’s experience of the phenomenon and the sense they make of their experience rather than the structure of the phenomenon” (Eatough & Smith, 2017, p. 3). Consistent with Heidegger, IPA also emphasises the exploration of the nuanced complexities of ‘person-in-context’ (a particular person in a particular context) (Larkin et al., 2006). It is important to understand and makes sense of the individual’s accounts of their own experiences associated with their contexts (Eatough & Smith, 2017; Smith et al., 2022). Thus, IPA is also an idiographic and inductive research approach. For example, Mandarin and English learning is required in Chinese nine-year compulsory education. There were 80.72% of China’s population which spoke Mandarin in 2020², and it is also a trend to attend extra English classes in the ethnic minority areas of China (see Bulag, 2003; James & Park, 2011; Zhao, 2007). However, as Guihen (2020) said, the subjective stories behind the trend or statistics can illuminate and contextualize the numbers. To shed light on the idiosyncratic meanings in each case, I committed myself to investigate the individual participants’ subjective engagement with their own context.

Another feature of IPA is its hermeneutic standpoint, which assumes that participants need to interpret their own experiences in their way, while the researchers also attempt to make sense of what participants try to express. This is known as the double hermeneutic. According to Larkin et al. (2006), the phenomenological (descriptive) and hermeneutical (interpretative) nature of IPA enable the study to ‘give voice’ to participants while it equips researchers with the flexibility to relate the ‘voice’ of participants to a wider social, cultural or theoretical context in order to make sense of the concerns of participants.

Conceptualisating ‘Multilingual Lived Experience’ Based on the Understanding of IPA

Lived experience, as an interpretive phenomenological concept, is not simply seen as fact or reality, but it is more about the understandable meaning of the experiences of a given person. Gadamer (2004) claimed that when something becomes ‘experienced’, it is not just what it is experienced but more about “its being experienced makes a special impression that gives it lasting importance” (p. 53). In other words, uncovering the experience endowed with special meaning by the participants is the main objective of interpretive phenomenological research.

This study aims to apply the concept of lived experience to the field of Applied Linguistics (multilingualism), narrowly exploring lived experience related to language learning and practice. As multilingualism is a complicated individual and social phenomenon (e.g. Tai & Wang, 2024), it needs to ascertain the multilinguals’ life stories associated with their language learning and practice in different contexts (e.g. school, family, different language dominated-society), but more importantly, it requests to dig into the interpretations that multilingual learners and/or speakers attribute to these experiences. With the recent social turn in the field of Applied Linguistics (Block, 2003, 2007), language learning is seen as a sociocultural and sociohistorical process, rather than a psychological construct (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Ushioda, 2009). Post-structuralist theories view language and identity development as a site of struggle, and this struggle or contestation is shaped by ideologies and the learners’ understanding of capital.

Thus, “multilingual lived experience”, as a key term and defined by this study, is drawn on the understanding of interpretive phenomenological foundation (e.g. Frechette et al., 2020; Heidegger, 1927; Larkin et al., 2006; Smith & Osborn, 2008) and post-structuralist theory on language (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton & Morgan, 2012; Ushioda, 2009). It exclusively focuses on multilingual speakers’ experiences in their everyday life regarding their language learning and practice, with the contextually relational analysis of power and resistance in a multilingual’s life trajectory. As Eatough and Smith (2017) said, an IPA study not only can focus on the small parts of the experience but also can concentrate on the whole experience that “is meaningful in the context of one’s life as it has been, is being and might be lived” (p. 7). For the participants of this study, learning the ethnic language (Mongolian), the majority language (Mandarin) and the global language (English) is throughout their whole education system from primary to tertiary education. In other words, the multilingual lived experience was seen as a long-term (and still ongoing) process for ethnic minority students in this study, rather than a staged learning experience (e.g. primary, secondary, and high school experience). I intended to provide a holistic and longitudinal view of how Mongol-Chinese multilingual learners make sense of their learning experiences in the context of their life trajectories. Simply put, the rationale for this IPA project focused exclusively on Mongol-Chinese multilingual individuals’ lived experiences as a whole with detailed analysis.

Positionality/Reflexivity

Compared to reflection that can happen before, during and after an event, reflexivity is more centred on the researcher’s self-awareness in relation to the research itself and methodology, which provides a stance of being able to locate the researcher in their research (Mann, 2016). As I discussed above, IPA is grounded on an assumption that researchers make sense of the data based on their participants’ interpretation (the double hermeneutic). To ensure the trustworthiness and transparency of data analysis, researchers are required to actively engage in the process of reflexivity and maintain awareness of the potential factors (such as researchers’ personal experiences, biases, and previous knowledge) that may influence the way to approach and analyse data. However, as Rodham et al. (2015) suggested, reflexivity does not require the researcher to put aside their preconceptions, but to become aware of their role in the creation of knowledge (Rodham et al., 2015). To provide a holistic ‘audit trail’ for my readers and enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of this research, it was necessary to show my background and experiences that may influence the research.

I am from the Mongolian minority, growing up in the IMAR of China. I was educated in the Chinese mainstream Han education system to the postgraduate level and Mandarin was used as the language of instruction. My participants and I have common backgrounds (e.g. we are all from the IMAR and self-identify as Mongol), but there are more differences (e.g. English is L2 for me but L3 for the participants). The uneven linguistic position between me and my participants also caused a series of multilingual challenges as the research continued. The shared background makes me emotionally close to the participants, but also feel like an ‘outsider’ because of the different first language. On the other hand, I am unlikely to have presuppositions on their language learning experience and identity (as Mongol and/or Chinese) constructions. Thus, this ‘liquid’ positionality enables me to hold a more ‘curious stance’ towards data and am open to any possible (LeVasseur, 2003).

Data Collection and Data Analysis

An in-depth interview is the typical research method for IPA to get personal (retrospective) accounts, with a comparatively small size of sample. For this project, there was a significant time lapse in participants’ multilingual lived experience from the initial stage to their latest stage. In order to fully explore participants’ lived experiences, the homogeny of participants’ backgrounds and the size of sample were important considerations. Only six Mongol-Chinese multilingual speakers (Mongolian as L1, Mandarin as L2 and English as L3) were purposively selected by a snowball sampling strategy. All the participants were required to self-identify as ethnic Mongols and Chinese residents. Due to the global pandemic of COVID-19, semi-structured interviews with twelve open-ended questions were conducted online on the basis of one-to-one. To initially approach potential participants, I introduced myself and explained the study (e.g. the research objectives, methods, etc.) via Wechat messages or voice calls. During this process, participants had a chance to ask me any questions that they were concerned about (e.g. the interview language, voice or video recorded interview) and then carefully thought about if they still wanted to take part in the study. In fact, I saw this ‘pre-interview’ communication as an important way to build rapport with participants and make sure they fully understood the research, which helped collect more detailed information later. Based on the preferences of participants, all interviews were audio-recorded via voice call by the researcher, and interview time ranged from one to two hours based on how many stories the participants shared.

To better understand the participants’ inner world and their multilingual lived experience, I collected and presented their basic background information in two tables. The first table shows the participants’ pseudonyms and their anonymized backgrounds, including their age, gender, education background, family linguistic situation (e.g. family dominant language), and employment status (e.g. full-time student/employee). The second table presents the participants’ basic multilingual learning information, including when they started to learn their L1/L2/L3, their self-assessed fluency of each language, and other additional speaking languages (see Ai, 2023 for more details). The background information is the foundation for both researcher and readers to feel the participants’ learning experiences and identity construction, especially their self-conflict in the practice of languages in their daily life (Ai et al., 2022).

According to (Kvale, 2007), good interview questions should not only focus on the ‘what’ of an interview, such as the theoretical conception of the research topic and the subsequent modes of data analysis, but also focus on ‘how’ of an interview in terms such as whether those questions can keep the flow of the conversation and motivate the participants to share their feelings and stories. As Smith et al. (2022) suggested, it is impossible to directly turn research questions into interview questions. IPA interviews attempt to put the research question “sideways” as it is usually at a more abstract and broad level. Instead, setting up the interview as an event enables participants to tell their own stories, feelings and thoughts in depth and in detail. The two research questions, which explore multiple language learning experiences and identity construction respectively, can be answered subsequently by detailed analysis. Thus, I divided two research questions into twelve interview questions that are in an easy-going, colloquial form to obtain rich and varied descriptions (see Figure 1). To enhance the dynamic interaction in interviews, the twelve interview questions were ordered with different focuses. They are sometimes intersectional, which means an interview question might provide answers to more than one research question while one research question also needs different interview questions to explore.

Figure 1.

Research questions and interview questions.

Following the idiographic nature of IPA, data was collected and analysed case by case. In keeping with the principles of IPA (Smith et al., 2009), there were six stages of data analysis. (1) After each interview, the recording was transcribed (in the interview language) and translated (into the output language-English). At this stage, I was already quite familiar with the transcription. (2) Then I started to make some exploratory notes as the first and second round of analysis. Based on the initial notes, (3) I identified the emergent themes. (4) All the emergent themes were clustered and generated superordinate themes. (5) Following this, I was able to move to the next case, repeating the same steps from conducting the interview. (6) The themes of six idiographic cases, including all the emergent and superordinate themes, were clustered and built the final hierarchical themes. However, the guidance with reference to the different levels of the theme is unclear and as such, there are inconsistencies within various IPA studies (see Bradding, 2015; Dawson, 2015; Guihen, 2020; Miller & Barrio Minton, 2016; Shorrock, 2013). In this research, the highest themes were known as superordinate themes, which include (several) sub-themes to illustrate superordinate themes from different aspects. Sub-themes were developed based on the emergent theme from the initial notes on transcripts.

For IPA, data analysis is a long process. To better understand the participants’ lived world, researchers need to read the transcription over and over again. As Smith and Osborn (2008) noted, each round of reading and analysis has the potential to find a new insight or perspective. Compared to the typical style of working on the paper suggested by Smith and Osborn (2008) and using software packaging (see Vicary et al., 2017), I decided to use the function of comment in Word to analyse data. I used different colours to represent different rounds of analysis. As Extract 1 shows, the note in green was the first round of analysis while the orange part represented the second round. The black part with the underline was the emergent theme. To align the analysis with the double hermeneutic, the main focus of my exploratory notes also moved from the first round (in green) of getting as close as possible to the participants’ inner world to the second round (in orange) of bringing their stories and interpretation into a wider social context or theoretical framework.

Extract 1

Multilingual Challenges

Holmes et al. (2013) define the concept of “researching multilingually” as “how researchers conceptualise, understand, and make choices about generating, analysing, interpreting and reporting data when more than one language is involved – and the complex negotiated relationships between research and researched as they engaged with one another in multilingual sites” (p. 297). When researchers are committed to do research multilingually, they must consider these issues throughout their study, including the stages of planning, developing, conducting and writing up (Holmes et al., 2022).

By the multilingual nature of this research, it was important to keep awareness of the complexities and possibilities of using more than one language in the study. In this multilingual research, participants were multilingual speakers of Mongolian, Mandarin and English, but I was a Mandarin and English speaker. Thus, I was challenged by the uneven linguistic position at many stages of this study, such as data collection (interview) and data analysis (transcribing and translating).

Interview Language

At the stage of the interview, the main concern was whether the participants were willing to be interviewed in their L2 or/and L3 and how to overcome the inbuilt linguistic power imbalance. Considering the linguistic background of the participants, Mandarin as a second language was taught from primary school and it was also (one of) the main medium of instruction in their university. Some participants self-assessed their proficiency in Mandarin was even better than their mother language. Moreover, Holmes et al. (2013) showed a possibility to neutralize the power imbalance within research relationships in a multilingual study by using a shared language. In this research, the shared but non-native language for both me and my participants is English.

As an interviewer-researcher, I needed to build rapport with my participants and ensure they felt safe and comfortable sharing their stories and personal feelings during the interview. On the linguistic level, I also wanted the participants to have more flexibility in language choice in order to balance the weakness of the non-first language option for the interviewees. Thus, the choice of interview language was placed in the participants’ hands. They were allowed to speak Mandarin and/or English or switch between these two languages freely as long as they felt it was better and more accurate to express their meaning. Thus, the rationale for providing Mandarin and English as interview language options was mainly based on the participants’ linguistic backgrounds and the attempts to increase the possibilities of collecting data (Holmes et al., 2013). However, six participants all chose Mandarin as their preferred language in the interview. Throughout the interviews with them, I, as a Mandarin-native speaker, felt their Mandarin was excellent. They were able to use appropriate slang and phrases to express themselves. Benefitting from the shared background with the participants, I have not encountered any cultural challenges in understanding their expression.

IPA emphasises researchers’ fully engage in research from data collection to data analysis (Smith et al., 2022). Based on my experience, the connection built with the participants in the interview was a very important and indispensable part for me to ‘stand in the participants’ shoes’. Now when I rethink the way I dealt with the multilingual challenges, I believe it was a reasonable decision to exclude the Mongolian language and offer bilingual language options. As I was able to fully engage in the interview and built a connection with my participants, I had a better chance to understand the emotional aspects of our conversation, such as the tone, long pauses, ‘embarrassed/nervous laughter’. In other words, the interviewer-researcher has a better position to catch these nuanced emotions shown in the interview and decide what should be included in the transcription later on.

Transcription and Translation

When participants and researcher(s) speak the non-English native language and the ultimate output of the study is in English, researchers need to have more considerations on the methods adopted for transcribing and translating. As Oxley et al. (2017) emphasise, the action of translation has a great impact on the final analysis of data, which is the first layer of interpretation. IPA is concerned with the interpretation of participants’ lived experiences with their ‘own words’. However, it is inevitable to have “translation discrepancies” when a translator-researcher tries to move participants’ original ‘meanings’ into a different linguistic, sociohistorical and cultural system (Stelma et al., 2013, p. 302). To minimize the ‘discrepancies’ between two languages and maximize the validity of the data, verbatim accounts in the source language were necessary for this research. Thus, data was transcribed verbatim in Mandarin, and then the transcriptions were translated into English by the researcher. Vocalization (such as laughing) and response tokens (such as a thoughtful Hmm, Huh, Yeah) that can capture meaning and emotion were retained in verbatim transcription and translation (Oliver et al., 2005).

As a translator-researcher, I take the position, following Rodham et al. (2015) and Smith et al. (2009), that bracketing, as an important stage in IPA, can only be partially achieved because it is difficult for researchers to predict what preconceptions will influence the way they approach the data until they start to ‘have conversations with’ the data. When researchers engage with the data trying to ‘stand in participants’ shoes’ to understand their experience, the stories/narratives from participants also influence and even change researchers’ preconceptions or presuppositions. In other words, gathering and analysing data is an interactive phase. According to Rodham et al. (2015, p. 69), holding a “reflexive and curious attitude” to data is an important part for IPA researchers to deal with the double hermeneutic, which can enhance the receptiveness to ‘new object’ (Smith et al., 2009). With this in mind, I always asked myself what it meant when I was transcribing and translating. I was trying to understand what participants meant in two different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Although there were no significant cultural challenges in understanding participants, I, as a novice translator, was struggling with the translation methods. I was worried the translated words were not the most appropriate ones in the English context because I knew how important it is to capture the original words of participants in IPA. In order to ensure the translation was as close as possible to the participants’ meaning in the original recording, I adopted the literal translation in which I also kept some Mandarin phrases that were difficult to translate or needed further analysis. For example, one participant thought speaking fluent English was very “高级” (see Extract 2). “高级” can be directly translated as ‘high class/level'. However, in this conversation context, English was seen as a ‘fancy’ language, so the participant felt a sense of superiority if she could speak fluent English.

Extract 2

Interviewer: What do you think is the biggest impact or change of learning English for you?

Participant: Hmm... the biggest impact is… I am able to make friends from all over the world. And…I just felt that if I can speak English fluently, I will feel…how to say… it is very “高级”.

As I said before, translation is the first layer of interpretation. Keeping the ambiguous original words in the translation was also useful for further analysis in the following stages. The below extract was the exploratory note I made on the above conversation.

Extract 3

Exploratory note:

1st round analysis (24/11/2021): She thought speaking English was very ‘高级’, what did she mean? ‘fancy’? ‘higher level’?

2nd round analysis (26/11/2021): As she said, the biggest impact of learning English was to “make friends from all over the world”. Obviously, English is a global language with more linguistic capital now. However, she seemed to assume that most people in the world were supposed to speak English so that she could make friends with the help of English. What did English as lingua franca mean to her? From the word “高级” she used, she put English at the top of the hierarchical language system. A global language = a ‘fancy’ language(?).

According to Stelma et al. (2013), researchers should be open to the various linguistic possibilities when they are doing research multilingually. Keeping this in mind, I tried to explore the research-relevant linguistic affordance for translation and interpretation in my exploratory notes. However, some original words were easy to translate but they could have another meaning behind the word or a better equivalent. For example, there was an interview question about a sense of ethnicity. One participant said she was not happy to hear any criticism on her ethnicity from other groups but it was fine to discuss it with the same group members (see Extract 3). She used the word “陋习” to cover the things like alcoholism, aggressiveness and laziness. As identity is a two-sided thing, it is not only about how a person identifies themselves, but also about how a person changes their way to see themselves based on others’ views. It is also known as the ‘looking-glass self’ (Cooley, 1902). Thus, it was important for me, a translator and interpreter, to dig deeper into the meaning of “陋习”. It could refer to ‘bad habits’ or something ‘true’ that she agreed with, at the same time, it could also refer to a ‘stereotype’ that was widely held by others but the target group members do not admit. As I was not sure about the best equivalent for this word, I decided to keep the original word in the translation.

Extract 4

Participant: I can feel the boundary between different ethnic groups. When someone says something bad about my ethnic group, like some ‘陋习’, I won’t feel comfortable with it.

Interviewer: What kind of the ‘陋习’ do you mean?

Participant: Hmm… like alcoholism, fights, laziness and so on.

In order to solve the challenge above and increase the trustworthiness of this study, transcription and translation were sent to participants to review. Although Mero-Jaffe (2011) outlines the potential issues of sharing transcription with participants and in this case that participant-checking is still not commonly adopted, it also “can be empowering for the interviewee and can show respect”(Mann, 2016, p. 232). In this study, participants, as English learners and speakers, were able to check the accuracy of the translation, add more explanations or clarify the ambiguous parts. At the same time, I realized it was time-consuming work for participants to check both transcription and translation. To reduce the workload of reviewing the two versions, I made notes or highlights on the translation where I was unsure about their meaning and expected to get more attention and responses. Drawing on my experience, I found the participant-checking stage was very useful for me to address the multilingual challenges, which was seen as the second chance for both me and my participants to clarify the ambiguous conceptions/words. The below extract is another example, which was taken from one participant’s checked translated transcript. I kept and highlighted the original word---“统一” [unification], and asked for her further clarification (in red). She gave her explanation in green.

Extract 5

The reason I wanted to clarify this word is that there are various Mongolian accents in IMAR and Mongolia. If the ‘unification’ refers to ‘standard Mongolian’ at the ethnic language level, I need to focus more on the ethnic minority itself or linguistic/accent discrimination (e.g. Dovchin, 2019). If this ‘unification’ refers to ‘Mandarin/Chinese only’ at the national language policy level, then I need to analyse her narratives from the perspectives of linguistic diversity, linguistic (especially heritage/minority language) rights, and ethnic minority multilingual speaker’s special emotion to their heritage language (e.g. Zhang & Adamson, 2020; Zhu, 2014). Therefore, it is essential to reduce the misunderstanding between the participants’ sense-making and the researcher’s understanding and interpretation at the stage of data analysis.

Ethical Consideration

The main ethical challenge in this research was the politically sensitive issues that it may bring up in the interviews. The criteria for defining sensitive topics/issues are malleable based on different political, social, linguistic contexts and individual experiences or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1977). As Smith et al. (2009) suggest, IPA requires researchers to be willing to engage with not only “a polite, mature and rather a scientific-surrounding world” but also a series of unpredictability and “the messy chaos of the lived world” (p.55). In 2020, the Inner Mongolian educational Department announced a new bilingual policy (see Atwood, 2020). It regulated that the textbook of three core subjects (Mandarin, History and Politics) in Mongolian Ethnic Schools would be changed to the Chinese nation-complied version and taught in Mandarin. Compared to the previous bilingual policy that Mongolian was used as the medium of instruction for all subjects, the new policy was seen as a threat to the maintenance and development of the ethnic Mongolian language. As a result, this announcement caused much resentment and led to a series of protests across the IMAR. At the same time, the local government gave relatively strong responses to the IMAR protests. Thus, the discussion around ethnic bilingual/multilingual education and the ethnic identity of Mongolian somehow became a sensitive topic at that time which was also the time of data collection. However, as Cohen et al. (2011) said, ethics are ‘situated’, which has to be understood in a specific and local situation. There was no clear boundary that can tell researchers and participants what are sensitive issues, especially about self-identification and the subjective feelings about language learning.

Larkin et al. (2006) emphasise the position of ‘contextualism’ in the relationship between IPA and ‘person-in-context’. As they said, IPA researchers not only should focus on the person’s relatedness to ‘the phenomena at hand’ but also need to commit to “exploring, describing, interpreting, and situating the means by which our participants make sense of their experiences” (p.110). However, I want to extend the understanding of ‘person-in-context’ to ethical consideration. Keeping and applying ‘situated’ ethnic awareness is as important as doing ‘contextualized’ analysis and interpretation in the IPA research.

In this study, the participants and I were in different contexts (I was in the U.K. doing my PhD study while most of my participants were in the IMAR of China) and this study had to be conducted online due to the global lockdown of COVID-19. The different geographical contexts not only mean different spaces and times, but more about different political and cultural environments, which influenced how participants and I perceived ‘political sensitivity’. When I realized that the understanding and defining of politic sensitive issues may vary among participants and me, especially under the special political and social context in the IMAR, I found I was not only required to understand my participants’ perspectives on their lived experiences but also should extend it to understand their worries and attitudes toward the research itself in their own contexts.

When I look back now, I think it was essential to explain the purpose of this study and the procedure of data collection carefully, honestly and clearly before collecting data. At that time, I had voice calls with potential participants to go through the Participant Information Sheet and Consent Form, giving them enough time to think if they were willing to take part in the study. In the process of approaching and recruiting participants by snowball sampling, I took a position of ‘fully understanding and respecting’ to the concerns and worries of potential participants. For example, when I put myself into participants’ contexts, I can understand why some potential participants who had worries about network security were unwilling to be audio-recorded. Thus, although approaching and recruiting participants online was challenging and time-consuming, I did not try to convince or recruit the participants who had any concerns or hesitation about this research itself.

Researchers also need to keep the awareness of ‘sensitivity’ and be flexible to deal with the unexpected ‘sensitive’ topics in the interviews. Although I excluded questions that may be perceived as politically sensitive, such as the 2020 bilingual policy (as mentioned earlier), some participants vaguely mentioned it when they talked about the change of their language learning motivation/attitudes. For example, one participant used “the last year’s thing” referring to the 2020 bilingual policy (see Extract 6).

Extract 6

This year, I began to pay more attention to the Mongolian language. Because of the last year’s thing, I [started to] extremely cherish it, but I want to know more about ethnic language and culture.

In this case, I think it is unnecessary to ask participants to clarify what “the last year’s thing” means if researchers can really ‘stand in the participants’ shoes’ to understand their relatedness to their context. Researchers not only need to be aware of the vague words or expressions that the participants used in the interviews but also should try to understand the reasons/ concerns/ worries behind the vague expressions and respect the way participants express themselves.

Conclusion

This paper provides an overview of how I understood the multilingual and ethical aspects of this IPA study and how I addressed these challenges in my doctoral journey. Firstly, this personal reflection not only aims to show the possibility of doing an IPA study multilingually but also wants to draw more attention from qualitative researchers to the methodological issue of how to combine an IPA study with the concept of ‘researching multilingually’. On the one hand, IPA emphasises the participants’ own voice with their own words. On the other hand, IPA also acknowledges the double hermeneutic of both participants and researcher’s interpretations. However, there is a methodological gap in terms of how to avoid or minimize translation discrepancies from different linguistic, sociohistorical and cultural systems in the process of doing an IPA study.

Secondly, IPA researchers also need to extend their understanding of ‘person-in-context’ to ethical consideration, especially for transnational and transcultural studies. It is significant to realize the idiographic context of each participant in terms of how they make sense of their experience. At the same time, the researcher also needs to notice the differences in (social, cultural and political) contexts between the research and researched, which might lead to discrepancies in how researchers and participants define the ‘sensitivity’. Based on my experience, participants may allude to some ‘sensitive’ phenomenon by using vague words/expressions or metaphors on purpose.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

A special thanks to the University of Manchester for providing the funding that made this paper available through open access.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) Studentship, Open Access from The University of Manchester.

ORCID iD

Disi (Adis) Ai

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Disi (Adis) Ai, upon reasonable request.

Notes

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