Survey Purpose and Goals

Map 1. Location of the five language communities involved in this assessment

1.2 Survey Purpose and Goals

The purpose of the survey was to determine to what extent the five language communities could participate in the proposed multi-language project. In order to achieve this, a number of goals were agreed with stakeholders. However, during pre-survey discussions, it became clear that the overriding concern was for each language to have a level of vitality that would not potentially undermine involvement in the project. Vitality was seen to be central because if threatened in any way, resources invested in language development may not subsequently benefit the community. In addition, there was a need to identify communities with minimum vitality which may need additional support at the initial stage of their involvement. Vitality was the deciding criterion for involvement because even if other factors of interest to stakeholders were present, questionable vitality would undermine the impact of language development on the community in any case. Thus, a clear goal hierarchy developed with the primary goal, and the focus on this report, being vitality: all other goals were dependent on this being at an agreed minimum. An assessment of vitality in situ required a tool that would elicit data simple enough to analyse while it was being administered to inform an instant decision about whether to pursue other dependent goals. It was not only research needs that determined that a rapid assessment of vitality was necessary. Logistical factors that are usually not encountered in PNG also constrained tool design. Typically, the SIL –PNG survey team has employed a range of lengthy questionnaires to assess vitality. These focus on culture and society, church, education, contact patterns and language use. While these are time- consuming to administer and produce data which is complex to analyse, survey teams in PNG typically find themselves working in an environment which is much more clearly defined than was the case on this survey. Typically, these are homogenous language communities living in distinct population centres and in concentrated geographical areas just a few miles across. As Section 1.1 described, this survey involved populations that were not homogenous with communities consisting of residents from a number of ethnolinguistic backgrounds. Thus, employing a traditional approach to survey in PNG and administering a large range of qualitative tools would both be overly time-consuming and provide more data than was appropriate, consequently requiring complex analysis. This was particularly the case for the four northern languages where, because of the ease of contact with the politically and economically dominant Kuanua-speaking community, vitality was most in question. This survey therefore called for the production of a new tool which provided enough detail to make a vitality assessment in situ while the tool was being administered, not during data analysis after the survey as is typical. 2 Methodology

2.1 Initial Approaches to Tool Design