Abstract
During the past ten years, public service interpreting (PSI) has become a flourishing field of research. Different kinds of studies have explored issues such as the role of public service interpreters, accuracy and deviations in their renditions, or primary participants’ views on and expectations of PSI. In terms of research methods, it is becoming increasingly popular to combine different data collection methods in the field of PSI, especially in large research projects. The aim of this article is to describe how multiple datasets have been used in a sample of studies. It presents a review of PhD dissertations in Spain that have combined different kinds of surveys, focus groups and/or direct observation. This is followed by a description of how a multimethod approach can contribute to the advance of PSI research and how it can compensate for the limitations of certain single-method approaches to PSI. It argues that, while multimethod research may be more demanding and time-consuming from the researcher’s point of view, it is more effective in terms of providing a holistic view of the object of study.
Highlights
Research into public service interpreting (PSI), known as community interpreting, has multiplied and diversified over the past ten years
It is true that some of the questions posed to interpreters (e.g. “what contents would you like to find in a specialised training course for interpreting for gender violence victims?”) were not triangulable with responses from the other datasets, which may be one of the reasons why no overall triangulation was conducted
This article has revisited some examples of research using multiple data collection methods in PSI
Summary
Research into public service interpreting (PSI), known as community interpreting, has multiplied and diversified over the past ten years. Data collection tools, combining different kinds of surveys, focus groups and/or direct observation This could be regarded as a multimethod approach to PSI. For the purpose of this article, the term ‘multimethod approach’ is used to refer mainly to the combination of different data collection methods in one specific study, its actual meaning is broader and includes analytical methods. Researchers may use this duplicated (or triplicated) information on the same phenomenon either to cross-check each set of results (which would entail some kind of validation), to compare different interpretations of the same reality, to draw a broader picture of what they are examining (i.e. the results from one dataset are used to complement the results of other datasets) or to juxtapose diverging epistemological positions. Section two reviews and discusses various studies which have used multiple data collection methods in PSI, while section three contextualises the work reported in section two vis-à-vis a brief overview of PSI doctoral research across Europe
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