Topics of public interest

Possible topics of public interest that your documentary could be about include:

• Linguistics:
  • Stigmatization of certain types of speech in schools (such as stigmatization of stuttering or local dialects)
  • Attitudes (positive or negative) towards different language varieties (such as Chiac in New Brunswick)
• Disabilities
  • Lack of accommodations (wheelchair access, Braille) or support (community organizations) for a disability or mental disorder in a particular region
• Food security
• Flooding
• Climate change
• Pollution
  • Water pollution
  • Air pollution

For your documentary, you could choose one of the topics in the list above, or (in consultation with your instructor) choose a different topic of your own.

To get you thinking about what sort of topic you might want to cover and what factors or challenges you might need to consider, below are some examples of specific publications or types of research that a documentary could be about.

Stereotypes about stuttering in rural Newfoundland

In 1993, Irene Doody, Joseph Kalinowski, and Joy Armson published an article titled “Stereotypes of Stutterers and Nonstutterers in Three Rural Communities in Newfoundland.”

The study described in the article surveyed 103 individuals in three small communities in Newfoundland and found that they tended to perceive hypothetical males who stutter as being “guarded, nervous, shy, self-conscious, tense, sensitive, anxious, withdrawn, quiet, talkative, avoiding, fearful, passive, afraid, introverted, daring, insecure, emotional, self-derogatory and inflexible” (Doody et al., 1993, p. 10), even though previous research generally found that people who stutter did not have different personality traits compared to people who do not stutter (Doody et al., 1993, pp. 12-13). As a result, Doody et al. (1993) hypothesized that negative stereotypes about people who stutter are based not on their personalities, but on the way their stuttering is perceived by people who don’t stutter (p. 13).

The advantage of creating a documentary short about this study is that it would be about a topic of public interest (that is, the study has real-world relevance).

On the other hand, it would not be possible to highlight the words of community members (i.e., the research participants or people who stutter), since the article does not include any quotes by them, and interviewing the research participants would not be possible.

Interviews about stuttering

The article “Stories of stuttering: A qualitative analysis of interview narratives” by Corcoran and Stewart (1998) consists of a description of a number of themes identified in interviews conducted with people who stutter.

The study contains many verbatim quotes from research participants, and this has a number of advantages:

1. Highlighting the research participants in a documentary about the research is straightforward and can be done by including quotes from the participants
2. Creating a documentary that focuses on the words of research participants is possible without conducting any new interviews (that is, a documentary based on this study could foreground research participants while relying entirely on pre-written material and the narrator’s voice)

On the other hand, as the researchers note, “Because of the small sample sizes used in qualitative research, it is impossible to generalize the results.” As a result, the documentary may not be able to focus as much on the results of the research or possible applications of the research.

A sociolinguistic survey

Another possibility might be to create a documentary about a sociolinguistic survey you have conducted (whether for published research or in the context of a sociolinguistics class), such as a dialectological survey meant to assess variation in the dialects spoken by individuals in different regions or social groups.

The advantage of creating a documentary about a survey like this is that you would have the possibility of including footage or recordings of research participants.

Obtaining consent for interviews

For this project, one way of obtaining consent for an interview would be to include a question in your survey asking each participant if they would consent to being interviewed for a documentary based on the survey. This way, you would be able to build a list of people to interview during the research process.

However, if your survey has already been administered and it did not ask participants for consent to be interviewed, then you may still be able to obtain consent for interviews by following up with research participants and asking each participant directly whether they would be willing to be interviewed.

Sources

Corcoran, J. A., & Stewart, M. (1998). Stories of stuttering: A qualitative analysis of interview narratives. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 23(4), 247-264.

Doody, I., Kalinowski, J., Armson, J., & Stuart, A. (1993). Stereotypes of stutterers and nonstutterers in three rural communities in Newfoundland. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 18(4), 363-373.