All residents of Switzerland are required to interact with the administrative authorities through written correspondence, necessitating the development of a degree of "administrative literacy" which will often involve plurilingual communication. This research project focuses on the understanding and drafting of written correspondence with social security bodies such as the unemployment, disability, AVS, and family allowance services. Despite an awareness of the challenges associated with these interactions, the underlying reasons are rarely studied within Switzerland's unique plurilingual and federalist context.
The primary goal of this research project is to explore the social, linguistic, and technological factors that facilitate or complicate written exchanges with social security bodies. This sociolinguistic study will employ an ethnographic and corpus-based approach and combine both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The project will cover three of Switzerland's national languages: French, German, and Italian. The project will be structured into three main sections:
- Corpus of Administrative Texts: With the support of relevant associations, problematic administrative letters will be collected and anonymized for subsequent quantitative linguistic analysis.
- Drafting Administrative Correspondence: A detailed analysis of the processes involved in drafting correspondence will be performed by collecting institutional documents and conducting semi-directive interviews with those responsible for drafting social security texts.
- Reading, Comprehension, and Remediation: Observations of interactions and semi-directive interviews with public writers (mainly charities and NGOs providing assistance with written correspondence) will analyse remediation strategies. This aims to explore how recipients and public writers collaborate in order to understand correspondence and craft appropriate responses.
This project aims to provide a comprehensive overview of major comprehension and writing challenges gleaned from real-life resources and situations. The research outcomes could help identify recurring textual problems as well as social, linguistic, and digital practices that facilitate the understanding of texts. This will enable differentiation between strictly linguistic issues and contextual or social problems. The project will offer recommendations for drafting administrative texts in the three languages covered, and propose social actions to make administrative correspondence more accessible and understandable.