Dynamic encounters in sociolinguistic enquiry: Meeting participants, reflexivity and anonymity

This paper discusses and problematizes three conflated ethically related questions,
namely the encounters with the participants, reflexivity and anonymity in research.
Within the framework of sociolinguistics and other disciplines, ethnography has been a
prominent research methodology used to generate data through participant observation
and interviews. Based on data from an ethnographic project concerning the intersections
between language and migration into Luxembourg, this paper aims to offer a critique of
positivist ideologies which argue that researchers need to keep distance from the object of
study in order to be objective in research. This distancing often means anonymizing blindly
(i.e. without checking consent) the research participants. However, one must remember
that one is researching ‘human subjects’ who, similar to the researchers, have their own
agendas, desires and life goals (Juffermans, 2010). The paper empirically demonstrates
that there is a need to ‘move away from representing identities of researcher and research
participants in fixed and binary terms’ (Martin- Jones et al., 2017, 190) of insider and
outsider. It concludes that ‘unless required by sensitive nature of the data collected’
(Juffermans, 2015,15), anonymity needs to be negotiated to the extent that it does not
erase the voice and choice of agentive participants.