ESPECIFICACIONES TÉCNICAS DE LOS TABLEROS:

I chose to conduct interviews with three aims in mind. Firstly, to gather personal infor- mation about this project’s participants to be able, afterwards, to correlate these factors with their linguistic practices. Secondly, to understand their level of awareness of the sociological and linguistic phenomena examined, and, therefore, I used interviews “as a resource for inves- tigating truths, facts, experience, beliefs, attitudes, and/or feelings of the respondents” (Talmy, 2010: 131). Thirdly, to explore the linguistic resources used by post-2008 crisis migrants in situations generally perceived as more formal and controlled. This offered the opportunity to confront the linguistic practices of speakers in at least two different contexts.

If it is true that interviews can be carried out in a relaxed environment which does not particularly affect speakers’ behaviour, it is also fundamental to note that interviews are formal speech events, presenting a pre-defined communicational structure. Although the etymology of the word interview recalls an exchange of opinions between two persons (Kvale, 2007), when interviews are used as research instruments, interviewers usually avoid replying to or commenting on the respondents’ answers. Moreover, while spontaneous conversations are based on the premise of avoiding conversation plans, interviews assume the use of pre-estab- lished questions which are asked by the researcher and must be answered by the interviewees.

Nevertheless, in order to avoid excessive communicative constriction, I followed a semi- structured model. According to Dörnyei (2007) and Kvale (2007), in semi-structured inter- views respondents are encouraged to answer a list of questions asked by the interviewer, who also allows their participants to diverge from the topics discussed, freely and without re- strictions. The list of questions used for this project can be found in Appendix B. This list was developed after carrying out a preliminary thematic analysis on the data collected during natu- ral events. Thematic analysis is an analytical technique widespread in social science studies. It

110 involves the coding of data on the basis of “emerging themes, trends, patterns, or conceptual categories” (Pavlenko, 2007: 166). For the present study, I underscored the most common themes in relation to the speakers’ engagement with translanguaging. I therefore created a list of questions which promoted discussions on themes that had regularly emerged in the sponta- neous conversations recorded. It seemed impossible to tightly structure interviews, which were generally carried out in a group setting (with a maximum of four interviewees per time). As Milroy and Gordon (2003) suggest, this kind of interview allows participants to feel more com- fortable and less constrained by the formality of the situation. One of the major issues consid- ered in the literature concerns the level of formality that a sociolinguistic interview should have. Wolfson (1982) and Labov (1981) suggest opposite points of view on the topic. The argument is summarised by Milroy, who maintains:

Wolfson (1982) has criticized Labov’s suggestion that fieldworkers make interviews as informal as possible by adopting a position of ‘lower authority and lesser consequence in the conversation’ (Labov, 1981:15). She argues that this is likely to lead to confusion, embarrassment and even hostility, since interviewees expect interviewers to ask them a series of clear questions (1987: 47).

The right balance between formality and informality must be acquired, in order to suc- ceed with this method, especially for a combined type of interview. Informality may be a pos- itive tool for linguists, but an uncertain feature for sociologists. Learning from my experience, not only can participants spoil an interview due to a lack of formality and structure, but also interviewers themselves may not be able to be perfectly conscious of their objectives if they try to be excessively informal.

This project’s participants are part of the so called “interview society” (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997), which is a concept used to describe the total acceptance of interviews in common western contemporary culture. They were thus aware of the implications necessitated by this kind of event. However, being aware of the rules of interviewing does not immediately mean being confident in the role of an interviewee. In fact, informants appeared to be slightly worried about this approach, while usually seeming comfortable with the use of the recorder during the naturally occurring events.

Another aspect must be taken into consideration when analysing the answers of the re- spondents. Participants may answer providing “socially desirable” responses (Bradburn, 1983: 72). Analysing the scale suggested by Marlowe and Crowne about social desirability (Crowne

111 and Marlowe, 1964, in Bradburn, 1983), Bradburn explains that informants, completing ques- tionnaires, are most likely going to choose the most “socially desirable” answers, especially if they feel the need to be accepted by the interviewer and by the rest of society. We can see that the same attitude applies not only in sociological but also in linguistic research. In some cases, I had the impression that the informants were keen to please me or that they wanted to ‘prove’ their linguistic skills. I would maintain that, during some interviews I carried out, it was possi- ble to identify the informants’ willingness to utter not only socially, but also linguistically de- sirable responses based on what they thought I would want to discover through my research. However, I believe that even these episodes were relevant to understanding speakers’ linguistic practices and their ability to display a full range of identities and so this is not necessarily a weakness of the research.

Overall, these interviews provide data which can go some way to answering the research questions regarding the participants’ point of view and their perspective on the phenomena investigated. As I said, the preliminary analysis of the initial data collected (both initial record- ings and the first interviews) influenced the second phase of interviews carried out after June 2017. In the preliminary analysis of the data, I thematically categorised the topics linked to their migratory experience that seemed relevant for the participants and the episodes in which translanguaging practices were deployed. I therefore re-structured the interviews with the pur- pose of obtaining a deeper insight into specific aspects that emerged in the conversations and the interviews recorded previously.

Usually, the participants showed a high level of awareness of the phenomena discussed, and they provide interesting reflections on their migratory situations, which, in turn, influenced this project. For instance, participants challenged the idea of community, showing themselves to be resistant to theoretically imposed groupings. Moreover, the participants suggested func- tions of the languages involved in the multilingual practices they engage with and they reflected on their attitudes towards Italian, English, and dialects, and on the contact between these lan- guages. This element was then relevant to understanding the uses of speakers’ translanguaging practices in the dateset.

The interviews were then analysed following different steps. Firstly, I thematically ana- lysed them, highlighting narratives (Pavlenko, 2007) and discourses shared by the interview- ees. As Pavlenko (2007) highlights, thematic analysis may present some weaknesses which can be overcome by including other levels of analysis and relating the emerging themes to relevant

112 theoretical frameworks. I therefore triangulated the data by highlighting the connection be- tween the multilingual practices participants engaged with and their reflections suggested in the interviews. I related each speaker’s linguistic practices to their attitudes and beliefs regard- ing the changes in their language repertoire in order to draw a complete sociolinguistic profile of each informant. I then used the information collected in the interviews and through my eth- nographic observation to corroborate the analysis of participants’ translanguaging practices. Such triangulation of diverse pieces of data helped to add robustness to my conclusions regard- ing migrants’ linguistic practices. As explained in section 1.2., 1.3. and 3.1.16, my study is informed by the principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith and Osborn, 2003). It is difficult to assess the validity of results in a study which relies on an interpretative lens. For this reason, I triangulated different type of data in order to reach solid conclusions.