Abstract Summary
This presentation will report on two methodological innovations that I have developed over the course of a large-scale examination of the strategies and sources of regulation of international students at a major university in London, UK. The project involved several sequential studies with more than 130 in-depth interviews, think aloud/introspective protocols, and stimulated recall sessions. For data analysis, I needed methods that could afford in-depth understanding within single cases while also enabling me to compare across cases and over time. As a result, I developed two rigorous qualitative methods. The first method, Narrative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (NIPA), draws on narrative and phenomenological psychology to research the experience of strategic behavior (i.e., what it is like). The second method, Psychological Process Tracing (PPT), draws on methodological work in political and cognitive science to unpack potentially causal parts of a mechanism that link the triggers of strategic behavior to its outcomes (i.e., how does it happen). Both methods prioritize in-depth investigations of a small number of cases yet embrace very different views on the nature of reality and how we can research it. I will briefly describe both methods and provide examples from my own studies to demonstrate their applicability.
Argument :
In recent years, there has been an uptick in methodological interest in applied linguistics. 2022 saw the journal of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics publish its first issue. There has also been no lack of methods-oriented books (see Li et al., 2022; McKinley & Rose, 2020; Rose et al., 2020), each with aspects relevant to the study of language learning strategies and sources of regulation. However, with the exception of certain chapters in these volumes and those from Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2019) and Phakiti et al. (2018), for example, coverage of rigorous qualitative methods that can be used for in-depth analysis of strategies and sources of regulation are few and far between. More concerning, though, are qualitative outputs in major journals that barely go beyond the claim that "themes emerged" (as if by magic) in their description of data analytic procedures. Most of us have been guilty of this at some stage in our careers. Nevertheless, there is still time and space for methodological discussion. This presentation will report on two methodological innovations that I have developed over the course of a large-scale examination of the strategies and sources of regulation of international students at a major university in London, UK. The project involved several sequential studies with more than 130 in-depth interviews, think aloud/introspective protocols, and stimulated recall sessions both. For data analysis, I needed methods that could enable in-depth understanding within single cases while also enabling me to compare across cases and over time. As a result, I developed two rigorous qualitative methods. The first method, Narrative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (NIPA), draws on narrative and phenomenological psychology to research the experience of strategic behavior (i.e., what it is like). The second method, Psychological Process Tracing (PPT), draws on methodological work in political and cognitive science to unpack potentially causal parts of a mechanism that link the triggers of strategic behavior to its outcomes (i.e., how does it happen). Both methods prioritize in-depth investigations of a small number of cases yet embrace very different views on the nature of reality and how we can research it. I will briefly describe both methods and provide examples from my own studies to demonstrate their applicability.ReferencesLi, S., Hiver, P, Papi, M. (Eds.) (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Second language Acquisition and Individual Differences. Routledge. Phakiti, A., De Costa, P., Plonsky, L., & Starfield, S. (Eds). (2018). The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Linguistics Research Methodology. Palgrave. Hiver, P., & Al-Hoorie, A. (2019). Research Methods for Complexity Theory in Applied Linguistics. Multilingual Matters. McKinley, J., & Rose, H. (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Routledge.Rose, H., McKinley, J., & Briggs Baffoe-Djan, J. (2020). Data Collection Methods in Applied Linguistics. Bloomsbury.
