Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

304 ANALYZING DATA

fore, it will be necessary to provide an informative description of just who is involved in the

conflict, and why. What is needed here is not a simple list of organizations that have weighed in

on the issue, but rather a description of the main camps (each of which may contain many specific

organizations) that have staked out opposing claims in the debate over this particular policy issue.

Further, the reader will need some sense of what motivates the members of each set of protago-

nists. What do they want? Why do they care about this issue? In a preliminary way, the goal is to

describe the backgrounds, motivations, and key positions of each set of protagonists in the de-

bate. Once again, this is done by sifting through the materials the analyst has gathered through

research: newspaper and magazine accounts of policy debates, internet Web sites posted by po-

litical organizations, lists of witnesses testifying before legislative committees, and the like.

In writing my book, for example, I quickly found that in the United States, language policy

conflict is waged primarily between two opposing camps. On the one hand, a number of groups

and individuals want policies promoting English as the sole public language of the United States,

so that public policy will motivate speakers of other languages to make English their own public

language. This camp believes that public policy certainly should not encourage the use of lan-

guages other than English in the public spaces of the country.

On the other hand, a competing set of groups and activists sees the United States as historically

multilingual and believes that non–English-speaking communities have been treated unjustly for

their linguistic “difference.” Accordingly, these protagonists want policies that promote bilin-

gualism, so that members of language minority communities will become fluent in English, but

also so that their home languages will be treated with respect and dignity by their government.

Following terminology used by some partisans in this debate, as well as by some outside observ-

ers, I labeled the former group “assimilationists” and the latter “pluralists.”

Step Two: Describing the Context and the Protagonists’ Policy Proposals

Once the policy analyst has described the core issues in the policy conflict and the protagonists

that are fighting over these issues, the next step involves describing more fully the context and the

policy proposals of the primary protagonists. This step involves describing the historical setting

and social context from which the conflict has emerged and the conflicting policy proposals being

made by the protagonists.

The first part of this step involves preparing a brief description of the historical context in

which the policy conflict has emerged. Answering questions like the following will help in ad-

dressing this important phase of the analysis: What has been going on in the social setting of this

policy issue that has generated a demand for a new or revised policy? What sorts of social changes—

that is, demographic, economic, technological, cultural, political—have been occurring that might

account for the emergence of this policy conflict?

In the case of language policy, for example, there is a major conflict between the partisans

over how to understand the historical context of U.S. linguistic diversity, and outlining these

competing understandings is itself illuminating in coming to terms with what is at stake in this

conflict. Linguistic pluralists see the relevant historical context as one in which the dominant

Anglo and English-speaking majority in the United States has consistently, over several centu-

ries, treated members of ethno-linguistic minority groups unjustly by working to marginalize and

subordinate their cultures and languages as not really “American.” Pluralists also believe that this

unjust treatment is integrally related to the fact that many U.S. ethno-linguistic minority groups

first became Americans not through voluntary immigration or choice, but through conquest or

purchase and annexation (e.g., American Indians, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, etc.), and