A Tale of a First Timer: Conducting Research in Your Non-Native Language
English is my 3rd language. The majority of Indonesians are multilingual, we usually speak Indonesian and at least one regional dialect. For me, my native languages are Indonesian and Musi Malay.
Growing up as an Indonesian, I am fairly exposed to an English-speaking environment. For us Indonesian, it’s compulsory to learn English from elementary school to college. Still, having years of experience under my belt also couldn’t stop me from making hiccups here and there sometimes.
This project was the first project assigned to me upon joining Somia CX. I was pretty anxious because this was also my very first time interviewing respondents fully in English. It was not a casual conversation in English, it’s for work! It was nerve-wracking.
The research was about the gaming experience. Our client wanted to understand how the Singaporeans would react to their product. We interviewed respondents who were both gamers and nongamers.
Here are some takeaways from my “daunting experience as a first-timer”. I will break down my learnings from the preparation to the research day.
1. Breakdown the discussion guide and do some research
I am not a gamer. I don’t own any gaming consoles. Chances are I only play games once or twice a year when my brother brings along his Nintendo Switch to play Super Mario Party on a family reunion. Other than that, I was clueless about gaming.
When I was assigned to the project, I did plenty of research about gaming. I studied a lot about the most hyped games, the gaming gears, even the latest news in the gaming industry. This research helped me to familiarize myself with the world of gaming.
It was nice that I could understand and visualize my respondents’ thoughts. On top of that, the research that I did was not only helping me to connect with respondents but also brought me closer to my brother. Previously, I couldn’t imagine discussing the latest gaming consoles or the PC games he plays. Now, I chimed in when he mentioned his plan of buying a new gaming console.
Although I did my due diligence, there was a topic that apparently I missed. I was too immersed in building up my knowledge about gaming until I forgot to do some research about how Singaporeans live. I thought there would not be any major difference. This was where I made a slip-up as an international researcher who did remote research!
Our project was not only about getting to know the market but also understanding gaming behavior. Talking about behavior, of course, there would be some connection to their day-to-day life. Since I was not doing proper research on how Singaporeans live, I could not paint the picture even when they kindly explained something to me.
When they talked about how they overcame the WiFi problems in their houses. They shared how the sharp corners around their apartments sometimes create problems with the WiFi connection and they had to install more than 1 WiFi router to solve this. One respondent shared that she had WiFi routers installed in every room of her house. I could hardly relate with them as an Indonesian, I lived in a landed house with plenty of open space where we only need 1 router to cater the whole house. These were the missing dots I had to connect.
The slip-up taught me to step up my game for the second round of the research.
I came up prepared. I went through every single question on the discussion guide. I noticed that we were also going to be covering topics around electricity consumption. I read about the electricity system in Singapore before I met the respondents. This time, I finally could nod with confidence because I already understood the topic.
Researching about the day-to-day life of our respondents is sometimes overlooked in research preparation. While in remote research where the researcher and the respondents are located kilometers away, the prior knowledge about the respondents’ day-to-day life will come in handy. Having a general knowledge about how people live in a certain city or country to have a broader context and deeper understanding about them.
Lesson learned #1
Do your homework! Build your knowledge around the products and the people that you’re about to meet.
2. Get Used to the Locals’ Language in a Remote Setting
We had pilot sessions with our internal team to test out the research flow. We did not get any access to the local respondents until the D-day of the research.
A lot of “what ifs” went around my mind constantly. My biggest concern was “what if I couldn’t catch up with the respondents then missed some important details when I’m in charge of the note-taking?”. We would have the sessions recorded but having some notes taken during the session is handier than revisiting the 90 minutes-long recordings to connect the dots.
This thing got me thinking of what kind of method I can do to “train my ears” to get used to Singlish (Singaporean English) since Singaporeans are well known to speak fast and use a lot of slang.
Then I got my Eureka moment while listening to a podcast. I tried binge-watching videos and podcasts from Singaporean content creators to get used to their accents, choices of words, and speaking pace.
I watched Youtube videos that involved some interviews with the locals. I studied some local slang just in case my respondents mentioned the words during our interviews. My favorite type of content was a talk show where the creators met the locals and briefly interviewed them on the spot. It helped you to understand how the locals usually speak in a natural setting.
Luckily, my effort pulled off. Especially the slang. I bet I wouldn’t be able to get the whole picture easily if I didn’t learn the local slang.
Lesson Learned #2
Get to know popular local slang. Watch some videos from local content creators on Youtube, it would help a lot!
3. Write a Full Script Interview Scenario
I had a bad habit of blabbering when I’m nervous. To overcome my anxiety, I wrote down the full scenario of the interview, including the trivial things like the introduction, asking permission to record, the online NDA, and the outro. I knew I could come up with my own words for these parts, but deep down, I knew my racked-up anxiety might make me forget what I intended to say.
I printed the discussion guide. Added notes here and here. Highlighted some parts.
It might sound silly to write down everything, even the intro and outro parts. In my case, it helped.
Lesson learned #3
Having a full script will help contain your nervousness and save you from murmuring “um” way too much during the interview
However, there might be a case when you don’t need the complete script, having it ready will bring you some peace of mind.
4. Refrain Yourself to Google Something in the Middle of Notetaking
I’ve got this advice from a podcast that I listened to a week before the research kickoff. I got this helpful piece of advice from one of the episodes of The Influency Podcast by Hadar Shemesh. In her podcast, Hadar shared her tips on note-taking for nonnative English speakers.
Before listening to this podcast, I was guilty of googling everything I didn’t know right away as well as when I’m in the middle of listening to a podcast. Then, I realized when I did that, I ended up missing chunks of information because, again, multitasking is a myth. You can’t possibly channel your attention to 2 activities at the same time.
This time, the challenge was a bit harder since I had to pay a lot more attention since the interview was not in my mother tongue. I proudly say that I managed to resist the urge to Google things during the interview.
During the interviews, some respondents mentioned words that I was not familiar with. I jotted down the words based on what I “thought” I heard. A respondent even brought up a Chinese phrase to describe her thoughts. She mentioned something “kechuan”. I just took a lucky guess of the spelling and wrote them down. Later I learned that she was sharing that she was just a cameo, not the main character when it comes to gaming in her household. 😆
Lesson learned #4
Forget the spelling, jot them down, and Google them later after the interview.
Believe it or not, feeding your curiosity during a note-taking session is not worth it since you might miss the crucial information from respondents.
Despite being a first-timer, the preparation (or more like an over prep) eased my nerves and helped me to nail the session. It might look over the top, but it’s worth a try especially if you are about to conduct a remote interview across the world.
If you have any tips related to remote international research, share them in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
Thanks to Michelle Natalie Susanto and Chin Chin Burkolter
