Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

some 200 informants in the seven Nordic language communities have expressed in a set of
interactive interviews, and by investigating the implicit (cf. Östman 1986, 2005, Mattfolk &
Östman 2004) attitudes and ideologies that we think we can deduce from these data.
4. Opinions and attitudes through interviews
This study on language attitudes as explored in the MIN-project is a complement to Kristian-
sen (this volume). Whereas the material presented in that study derived from an opinion poll
survey and an experiment and is all purely quantitative, the data analyzed in this study derive
from interactive interviews and are of a hybrid kind, consisting of both quantitative and quali-
tative data. For further discussion of the MIN interviews, see Thøgersen (2005a). The rationa-
le for using interview data as a complement to survey data is twofold. First, the smaller num-
ber of informants selected for qualitative interviews makes it feasible to ask significantly mo-
re questions than is practically possible in a large-scale survey. For comparison, we can note
that respondents in the poll survey were asked ten questions, whereas the informants in the
interviews were asked about 120 questions. Secondly, the semi-qualitative nature of the inter-
views gives us insights into the informants’ ways of thinking and arguing about the questions
and about their responses in a close-to-real-life interactional situation. That is, we get data
about how the respondents cope with the issues raised, and thus hopefully a glimpse of the
interface between (their) ‘explicit’ opinions and (their) ‘implicit’ attitudes.
From each of the seven speech communities involved, between 24 and 48 informants were
interviewed. The informants were contacted through their working place so as to get infor-
mants from a wide variety of occupational and social backgrounds; some were warehouse
workers, others were business managers; some had only primary-school education, others had
university diplomas. Half the informants belonged to what might be termed ‘upper positions’
in the businesses as working places, the other half had ‘lower positions’. Another division we
made was that between informants working in ‘traditional’ occupations (i.e., businesses pro-
ducing artifacts and other concrete products) and those working in ‘modern’ businesses
(roughly information- and service-‘producing’ businesses). Again, half the informants came
from each of these two spheres, giving a total of four individual ‘life styles’. (On ‘life style’,
see further the article by Pedersen in this volume.) The ideal informant was around 35 years
of age; that is, we did not set out to have age as a sociolinguistic variable. However, this ideal
proved to be hard to maintain for some speech communities, so rather than discarding poten-
tial informants on the basis of them being too young or too old, we chose to relax our initial
requirement of keeping the age factor constant. This decision proved to be a benefit as well as
143