Chapter 7

“That’s a stupid question!”

This study of a bilingual (Japanese-English) research interview, taken from a project investigating language practices in intermarried (Japanese/non-Japanese) families, examines the impact of interviewer and interviewee’s differing, and sometimes competing, perspectives and agendas. Drawing on conversation analysis and informed by work on stance, it examines how the interviewer’s presumptions, based in part on interviews with other family members, shaped the interview and challenged the Japanese interviewee’s identity as a good parent, and even, potentially, his linguistic identity as an English speaker. Following the interviewer’s code-switches from English to Japanese as part of repair, the interviewee uses standard Japanese and a regional variety that breaks out of the ‘information gathering/confirming’ frame and expresses an extended, more direct, and oppositional stance toward the research topic. By closely examining the unfolding interaction between interviewer and interviewee, this chapter offers a reflective perspective on research interviewing practices and how language ideology and language choice impact the generation of data and the management of conflicting perspectives between interviewer and interviewee.