ABSTRACT
Research methodology textbooks often mention language and culture as additional factors that should be taken into account when planning research, particularly if the researcher is collecting data in multilingual or unfamiliar cultural contexts. By contrast, our starting point in this book is to consider language and culture as central to research methodology. This chapter sets out to introduce alternative theoretical lenses that can help to challenge the notion that any research study is ‘culture-free’ and point to ways of moving beyond a ‘technicist’ approach. Instead, I take an ideological perspective on power, language and culture, raising questions which the rest of the book will explore in more detail. What part does language play in shaping the relationship between researcher, and research participants and the audience of a research text? How have cultural values inuenced the research design and research questions? Taking the concepts of culture and language at face value often leads to an emphasis on identifying contrasts and how to bridge these dierences. Rather than focusing on the ‘cross-cultural’ in this way, we introduce a more dynamic concept of culture and language in this book as processes that inuence research design, data collection, analysis and writing.
