hoped to get a high response of people that matter. Of course, all applied lin-
guists are equal, but some are more equal than others. In the end, the selection
of informants was done on the basis of my intuition and my knowledge of the
field, overviews in journals and handbooks, and attendance of conferences.
And, as mentioned earlier, I asked all informants I interviewed to give me
names of people to include. This led to afirst list of informants I could
interview at different occasions; during conferences, but also during visits.
In early 2014 a sabbatical allowed me to interview several people on the East
Coast and in the Bay area of the United States. Ideally, I would have inter-
viewed all the people on my (constantly growing) list, but it became clear
that the resources in terms of money and time were too limited. I managed to
complete 38 face-to-face interviews in the end, and sent out the questionnaire to
fill out to 68 additional informants. Table 2.1 lists the informants interviewed
and Table 2.2 lists the informants contacted for the questionnaire.
The questionnaire was returned, after several reminders, by 56 informants.
The data collection was ended on May 1, 2014. Some people indicated that they
did not feel that they were applied linguists, like Harald Clahsen, who now
sees himself more as a psycholinguist. The informants were contacted by e-mail,
and there is no guarantee that those who did not respond actually received the
e-mail. Therefore, non-response will not be reported on with names. To what
extent the non-response has led to a bias is unclear.
2.3 Gender aspects
In the interview, Elana Shohamy stated:“Men stick with men.”I never felt
like I was that kind of man, but here was an opportunity to test to what
extent this statement was true for the group of informants in my study.
When I selected the informants, gender was not on my mind. That in itself
already suggests a bias, but the data in the survey allowed me to go further: who
did my informants see as leaders in thefield and who were they influenced by.
In the list of informants, there are 45 women and 61 men. In the ques-
tionnaire there was an item on who else I should contact, and in most cases I
followed that up. I did not try to compensate for a gender imbalance. But I
now realize that by emphasizing the impact of citations and h-indices, there
is a bias, since that kind of competition is typically seen as a male rather
than a female characteristic. There may be women who have been very
important in thefield, but never aimed at publishing internationally. When
the informants do not mention them, such individuals are very difficult to spot.
One example from my own past is that my thinking about AL and testing has
certainly been influenced by my former colleague AnneMieke Janssen-van
Dieten in Nijmegen, who was very active in the Dutch testing scene, in particular
with respect to teaching and testing of Dutch as a second language. It might have
been better to specifically ask which women have influenced my informants.
The primary selection, of course, had an impact on other data, such as
who are seen as the leaders and who wrote the most important articles and
12 The informants