SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF POLITENESS AND ITS PROBLEMS IN USING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH APPROACH Esther Kuntjara, Ph.D. Faculty of Letters Petra Christian University Siwalankerto 121-131, Surabaya 60236 Indonesia estherk@peter. petra .ac.id Abstract: The use of qualitative research in sociolinguistic studies has attracted a considerable number of sociolinguists. The studies have yielded many interesting findings that could not be found satisfyingly in the use of conventional research. This paper will present one of the studies in sociolinguistics which concerns with politeness in Indonesian context. It is suggested that the study of Asian politeness especially, is best suited in using qualitative research method than traditional research method. I will present my own experience in dealing with the problems I encountered during the process of doing the research. Among other things are the problems of looking for the purposeful sampling, the presentation of myself in the research setting, and the ethical issue of lying or not lying in interacting with the respondents. Keywords: Qualitative, Politeness, Sociolinguistics, Sampling. 1. INTRODUCTION The sociolinguistic studies of politeness have generated a considerable number of interesting researches. Politeness as an issue in sociolinguistic field could probably be considered as started by Brown and Levinson (1978) who wrote their frequently cited book: Politeness: Some universals in language use. As mentioned in the title of their book, the writers claimed that the language use of politeness as they proposed are believed to be universal. Therefore, they set out some formulas to generate how people in the world dealt with the principles of politeness. Many sociolinguists at that time who were mostly from the white middle class society found Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness intriguing since they could apply the theory in their everyday life. Many other researches followed in their step and many of them were carried out by using traditional research approach. Brown and Levinson basically define politeness as redressive action taken to counter balance the disruptive effect of face-threatening acts. They claim that politeness involves showing concern for two different kinds of face needs: negative face needs or the want not to be imposed upon, and positive face needs or the want to be liked and admired. However, when such concept of politeness was later used by other sociolinguists who are coming from non-western languages and cultures, they found that the term politeness should be defined in different ways. Igbo society, for instance, defines politeness as “a response to one’s awareness of social expectations appropriate to his/her place in society” (Nwoye, 1992, p. 312). In Chinese, “to be polite in Chinese discourse is, in many respects, to know how to attend each other’s mianzi and lian and to enact speech acts appropriate to and worthy of such an image” (Mao, 1993, p. 463). In Javanese, Errington (1988) maintains that in relatively polite speech tendencies are “toward stylistic elaboration of address styles focused on the nonlexical, grammatico-syntactic apparatus, and toward expressions of deference focused on lexemes in the domain of person” (p. 226). Meier (1995) therefore maintains that the term politeness itself carries different denotations and connotations. According to Meier, the term appropriateness is a preferable definition. Within such view, “politeness can only be judged relative to a particular context and a particular addressee’s expectations and concomitant interpretation” (p. 387). Within all these concepts of politeness, the issue of politeness speech acts has