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Although the number of multilingual qualitative research studies appears to be growing, investigations concerned with methodological issues arising from the use of several languages within a single research are still very scarce. Most of these seem to deal exclusively with issues related to the use of interpreters and translators in qualitative research (e.g., Temple & Edwards, 2002; Temple, Edwards & Alexander, 2006; Edwards, 1998; Temple & Young 2004). Methodological investigations going beyond pure translation dilemmas in qualitative research are, however, almost non-existent. The reason for this seems to be simple: the situation where the researcher possesses mother-tongue fluency in all or most of the languages used in a particular study – and, thus, is in a position to probe interpretational and representational problematics related to the multilingual character of this study with an adequate depth – is very rare. The author of this paper has used her recent qualitative research work in the area of Information Systems as the basis for a meta-study in which she investigates selected methodological issues resulting from the use of five different languages within the frame of a single research work. This paper specifically focuses on challenges encountered and observations made concerning three different issues, namely, how to choose the interview languages in a situation where the prospective interviewees have very diverse ethnic backgrounds, which languages to use for the data analysis in a situation where the data has been collected in several different languages, and how to determine the most appropriate stage of the research for transitioning from the languages used to collect and analyze the data to the language of the final research product. Although this meta-study is based on an Information Systems research work and is, thus, specifically addressing qualitative Information Systems researchers conducting multilingual research and encountering language-related issues in their work, this study might also be of interest to any researcher using qualitative research methodologies and employing more than one language to collect data, conduct data analysis, and craft the final research product.

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Abstract:The case study reported in this paper focuses on the question: what are the critical factors that influence IT professionals' intention to adopt the Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm? This work reports a case study examining the e-Government initiative in a middle-sized European city. It uses an initial SOC adoption model developed through a proceeding interview-based exploratory study [2]. The current study has two principle aims. The first aim is to "shed some light" on the IT professionals' acceptance of such complex technological approaches as Service Oriented Computing in the e-Government sector and to report key learning issues emerging from the case study. The second aim of the case study is to bring further credibility to the first study and to validate empirically its assertions. Some of the major findings of the study are the replacement of the complexity variable by the variable of maintainability, and the replacement of the trust and dependency variables (both of interpersonal rather than of technical nature) by the variable of external involvement. The results of the study also suggest the introduction of the "champion" of the approach variable. Theoretical and practical implications that follow are presented and discussed.