Blurred Boundaries: Interpreters as Researchers in Cross-Cultural Settings

This is a study of ambiguities and tensions that occur within the role of the bilingual/bicultural researcher in an ethnographic study. This manuscript presents an analysis of three instances from two interviews in a study on the acculturation of deaf students in deaf kindergarten classrooms in Japan and the US. This is an auto-ethnographic analysis of conflicts found in fluctuating between multiple roles: research assistant, interpreter, cultural mediator, and sociolinguistic consultant. In these examples my bicultural knowledge allowed me to identify “hidden” meanings overlooked by other members of the research team. However, my interpreter role at times made it awkward to contribute my insights to the research team. The findings of this study show that interpreters who are linguistically and culturally in-between the researchers and researched play a crucial but delicate role in cross-cultural studies

I Found a Boot

A hardworking and well-worn boot, complete with intense personality from shadow and much texture. Its very appearance spoke volumes to me. I wonder if the person who lost it shares the same intensity and texture

Multiplicative and Additive Processes in the Subjective Evaluation of Travel Expense

Subjects were asked to make absolute judgments and relative ratings of travel expense for a series of hypothetical trips described by varying levels of distance to be travelled, gasoline price, and expected gas mileage. In Experiment 1, intuitive estimates of cost in dollars followed a multiplicative model analogous to the rational model but allowing individual differences in evaluating and weighting stimulus factors. In Experiment 2, subjective ratings of relative expense followed an additive model. An additive model implies that an extreme value of one factor will be balanced by more neutral values of other factors, whereas a multiplicative model implies that a single extreme value will have an exaggerated effect. Two interpretations of these disparate findings were considered: either the underlying information integration process differed as a function of how the information was to be used, or response differences were due to transformations of the internal responses to the overt response scale. Experiment 3, in which subjects were required to make both kinds of evaluations, ruled out the response transformation interpretation