Methodology for community attitudes

[Viktor77]

I'm making a plea for help in finding a methodology that can measure quantitatively the attitudes of an immigrant population towards their immigrant language versus that of the wider language of the country, ie. English. It's for a language shift and maintenance study. I've asked around but most of what I'm finding is very polarized, ie. I have a great quantitative methodology for language attitudes in an us versus them context, which for this study is Basque versus Spanish, but my immigrant community is less polarized. They see themselves as Americans, but also identify with their ethnic identity, and so I want something less harsh to include as a predictor. A lot of studies I find include this as a predictor but they never explain how they operationalize it. They just give a survey and then report the results. I want to operationalize this as an independent variable for a logistic regression.

Thanks for any studies you can provide!

[Salmoneus]

Wait, are you asking about the attitudes of a population, or of individuals?

If the former, your problem is that populations do not have attitudes.
If the latter, there is no problem. Just decide exactly what you mean by 'attitude', and then ask the people about that.

For instance, if you mean "whether people are well-disposed toward the language", ask people whether they are well-disposed toward the language. Depending on how rigorous you want to be you could go further and a) use multiple questions with different precise wordings ('do you have positive feelings toward...', etc), b) ask questions about actual praxis ('would you be more likely to get on well with someone who knew the language?', 'do you feel happier on days when you encounter the language more often?' etc), or even c) try to hide the purpose of these questions by burying them in control questions and trying to use proxies for real intentions.

Or, if you mean "whether people have a high opinion of the language", ask people whether they have a high opinion of the language. Etc.

What difficulty exactly do you think you have encountered?

[Viktor77]

Wait, are you asking about the attitudes of a population, or of individuals?

If the former, your problem is that populations do not have attitudes.
If the latter, there is no problem. Just decide exactly what you mean by 'attitude', and then ask the people about that.

For instance, if you mean "whether people are well-disposed toward the language", ask people whether they are well-disposed toward the language. Depending on how rigorous you want to be you could go further and a) use multiple questions with different precise wordings ('do you have positive feelings toward...', etc), b) ask questions about actual praxis ('would you be more likely to get on well with someone who knew the language?', 'do you feel happier on days when you encounter the language more often?' etc), or even c) try to hide the purpose of these questions by burying them in control questions and trying to use proxies for real intentions.

Or, if you mean "whether people have a high opinion of the language", ask people whether they have a high opinion of the language. Etc.

What difficulty exactly do you think you have encountered?

Yes, this is what I want, an individual approach to gauge attitudes towards the language, towards the so called intruder language, and towards the community, its pride, unity, heritage, etc. What you described is exactly how I intend to go about this, with a survey most likely and interviews, but it is best to use a previously attested to methodology instead of creating my own, especially for operationalizing this because in order to operationalize this into levels of an independent variable I must establish identities based on the responses. But I'd rather not just come up with something willy nilly, I'd rather look to previous research and see how this data was collected, sorted, and operationalized for other similar communities and studies.

And I wish not to study this qualitatively, which is how others I know are doing it. Not if I can avoid it.

[sirdanilot]

Posting here so that this appears in my 'own posts' list.

I cannot help you with this as these sociolinguistic-style approaches are a bit out of my area though I do think it is interesting.

If I search for 'language attitude' in my university library's catalogue I do get some interesting titles you might like. If you have trouble accessing them just drop me a PM.


Development and Validation of a Foreign Language Attitude Scale.
Raymond, Mark R. ; Roberts, Dennis M.
Educational and Psychological Measurement, 1983, Vol.43(4), p.1239-46

The language attitude survey of Jamaica data analysis
University of West Indies (UWI) (Mona). The Jamaican Language Unit.
2005

Is English a nuisance or an asset? Japanese youths' discursive constructions of language attitudes
Saito, A
System, 2014 Jun, Vol.44, pp.13-23

[Salmoneus]

Viktor: but you seem to have already decided on a methodology: asking people questions. You know how to ask questions, and how to collect and sort answers. The whole advantage of a survey approach is that it's hard to go wrong, provided you don't ask really stupid questions.

You could, of course, use alternative methodologies. Have you considered Q? Given that you're talking about subjective views, and presumably small sample sizes, Q might be appropriate, I'd have thought. You could also probably try one of the more numerical approaches to narrative analysis, although that might require more experience, and certainly a lot more work to be meaningful.

[Viktor77]

Viktor: but you seem to have already decided on a methodology: asking people questions. You know how to ask questions, and how to collect and sort answers. The whole advantage of a survey approach is that it's hard to go wrong, provided you don't ask really stupid questions.

You could, of course, use alternative methodologies. Have you considered Q? Given that you're talking about subjective views, and presumably small sample sizes, Q might be appropriate, I'd have thought. You could also probably try one of the more numerical approaches to narrative analysis, although that might require more experience, and certainly a lot more work to be meaningful.

I might have to consider Q if I can cross it over into sociolinguistics.

In the end, after considering all of the papers here and pages of others ones I sorted through, I decided to give up on the statistics and just study this qualitatively. It seems most papers on language maintenance and shift study attitudes and perceptions qualitatively. It's too difficult to study this quantitatively without some large sample size, and quite frankly, it might not be a good variable to study quantitatively.