ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how researchers influence the relationship between themselves and their participants, focusing on the subsequent coproduction of data. It considers the ways in which the involvement with the research participants affected the coproduction of data and how own personal histories also affected various aspects of the research, including study design, sampling, and analysis. The chapter presents two case studies that focus on language variation and identity. The first one is on Sam Kirkham's sociophonetic ethnography of a multiethnic secondary school in Sheffield, a city located in the north of England. The second is a study of second dialect acquisition and identity among British women in the United States and North American women in the United Kingdom. The chapter explores some of the issues surrounding researcher-participant dynamics in this reflexive turn in social science research, discuss the case studies in terms of researcher-participant relationships, and finally touch on the broader implications of our analyses for research in applied linguistics.
