When living with the people we study, the researcher soon becomes part of the family...  I spent about four months of a year with Sandra and Anna, sleeping on the white couch in Sandra's living room with a tape recorder and video recorder running much of the time.  I tagged along with these two wonderful women everywhere they went.  No matter if they had coffee together, went shopping, dropped the kids off at school or preschool, or went to Spain on vacation, my camera and I came along.

While I was interested in identity construction during that year-long research project, I realized that I first had to devise a theoretical/methodological framework that allowed me to incorporate all communicative modes, before I could seriously look at identity construction. 

Once the framework was devised, I felt that I needed to go back to fieldwork and test the validity of the framework.  That time, I decided to look at many different settings, thinking that if the framework was valid, it should be useful for any interaction .  So I studied, for example, interactions in an accounting firm and in a dental office, observed a traffic police officer and music lessons, and reviewed a study that I had conducted earlier in a bilingual classroom.

Now, that the framework is tested, the book (Analyzing Multimodal Interaction) has been written, I have returned to my interest in identity construction, and my new research project called "Multimodal Identity Construction: Five Case Studies" is almost complete.