The research supported by this award will investigate "linguistic triggers" in multi-cultural contexts. Research on verbal and non-verbal interactions has shown that even when people speak the same language, they may have different linguistic practices and preconceptions that can inadvertently inhibit mutual understanding. Where ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity is greatest, so is the potential for incorrect assumptions, misunderstandings, and misjudgments. This research will address this issue through the examination of a data set of over 400 recordings of such interactions to better understand what transpires: when do the interactions produce conflict, when do they not, and why? Findings from the research will support the development of social and legal policies and procedures to help prevent conflict and ensure public welfare and safety.
The research will be conducted by linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Sonia N. Das of New York University and Dr. Sherina Feliciano-Santos of the University of South Carolinsa at Columbia. In 2015, South Carolina became the first state to pass a law requiring police officers to wear body cameras. The researchers will analyze a subset of the first three years of these body-cam and dash-cam video recordings, faces blurred to protect privacy, to document communication patterns between law enforcement officials and subjects during Driving Under the Influence (DUI) stops. The researchers and their team will transcribe and code the video archive, with attention biographical, demographic, and contextual as well as linguistic factors. Recordings will be linked to their written case files to associate them with legal outcomes. This technical analysis will be supplemented with interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in South Carolina to further contextualize underlying assumptions about rights, language, and the interpretation of intent. The research will model the use of qualitative research methods for the joint analysis of ethnographic and corpus data. By asking how situational interpretations of subjects' and police officers' standard communicative practices may play a subtle yet crucial role in impacting rates of occurrences of force by or against police, he research will also provide data to assist in the development and implementation of law enforcement training and multicultural education to prevent the unnecessary escalation of force and the unintentional reproduction of biases.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
