Linguistic stance: An integrative paradigm for mixed methods social science

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article develops an integrative mixed methods framework grounded in stancetaking as the originary act through which qualitative interview and quantitative survey data are generated. The article examines how the basics of ‘everyday’ social stance—evaluation, positioning, and alignment within a sociocultural field—are strategically manipulated by social scientists in the twinned conditions of the interview and the survey. Relative to interview data, we demonstrate how participants link their stancetaking to wider sociocultural frames via the discursive devices of indexicality, accounting practices, and appeal to norms. Relative to survey data, we show how participants construct a ‘public’ via their engagement in the survey task, and how their stancetaking on survey items is virtually equivalent to ‘votes’ that are later aggregated to create second-order group-level stances. Mixed methods researchers then transform both qualitative and quantitative first-order stances into second-order stances that serve to describe and model social life. (Mixed methods, discourse devices, indexicality, normativity, interview, survey)