Abstract
Mallinson, Childs, and Van Herk’s new collection offers a unique and engaging approach to the design and conduct of sociolinguistic research. While a number of well-established books introduce sociolinguistic theories and methodologies (e.g., Johnstone 2000; Milroy & Gordon 2003), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics creates space for itself by focusing closely on the practical experience of planning and carrying out data collection. Relatively little attention is given to questions of why a researcher might use sociolinguistic methods or what analytic methods might be employed to make sense of collected data. Instead, Data Collection fills a niche by addressing itself to researchers who already know that they will conduct a sociolinguistic project but need a field guide for starting.
Data Collection is organized into four major parts: “Research Design,” “Generating New Data,” “Working With and Preserving Existing Data,” and “Sharing Data and Findings.” Each part is introduced by one of the editors. The parts are further divided into chapters, most of which are subdivided into an introductory article and a series of three- to four-page “vignettes.” These vignettes are the strikingly unique contribution of Data Collection to the genre of the introductory sociolinguistics text, offering concise, personal reflections on experiences and practices from established researchers. Because they are so brief, they afford great breadth in terms of interests and approaches—especially since each chapter and vignette is written by a different researcher, yielding contributions from fifty-five leading scholars.
Part 1, “Research Design,” emphasizes decisions that researchers must make prior to conducting research. Horvath introduces chapter 2, “Ways of Observing,” by teasing apart quantitative and qualitative approaches—but also noting that the approaches remain interrelated and are often applied in parallel. Farr, Wolfram, Stanford, and Habib each contribute a vignette to this chapter, together emphasizing the need to probe underlying social orders and linguistic practices within an investigated community prior to beginning a major study (i.e., through pilot studies or preliminary ethnographic work, or by building flexibility into research plans).
In chapter 3, “Social Ethics for Sociolinguistics,” Trechter advocates greater attention to sociolinguistic ethics. She acknowledges the ideal of “empowering” research as articulated by Cameron et al. (1992), but recognizes a number of real-world complications—for example, what empowerment might mean to those who are being researched versus what it means to researchers. In vignettes, Besnier, Mann, Ehrlich, and Sadler describe issues with subject privacy in a range of community spaces. Mann’s negotiation of informant privacy—which ultimately led him to impose a higher standard of anonymity than either his institutional review board required or his informants desired—is especially illuminating for understanding research ethics as a proactive, rather than prescribed, process.
Part 2, “Generating New Data,” devotes chapters to ethnography, interviews, audio recording, and written instruments. Levon’s chapter 5 introduction, “Ethnographic Fieldwork,” describes the balance that ethnographers must find between being outsiders (who would be denied access to the inner life of the community) and insiders (who would be constrained by community practices). Walker and Hoffman, Mesthrie, and Nichols describe gaining access to communities through understanding local needs, norms, and values.
In chapter 6, Becker differentiates between the sociolinguistic interview and “The Sociolinguistic Interview,” the latter being specifically the Labovian paradigm designed to elicit variation as different interview tasks change a speaker’s level of linguistic self-attention. This is followed by vignettes from Rau, Lucas, Hill, and Davis that describe conducting interviews in settings that have traditionally received less attention from sociolinguists, including endangered indigenous minority language communities, Deaf communities, and speakers with language impairments. Chapter 7 offers advice on “The Technology of Conducting Sociolinguistic Interviews,” with an introduction by de Decker and Nycz and a vignette by Hall-Lew and Plichta. Their reminiscences on lost data are strong warnings for researchers to practice using equipment before arriving at an interview and to take reasonable controls over recording environments, such as asking interviewees to move away from sources of background noise.
In chapter 8, “Surveys,” Boberg defends the usefulness of this traditional dialectology tool to collect and process large amounts of data quickly. Cambell-Kibler’s vignette shifts focus toward using surveys to study language attitudes, and Baron’s reiterates the importance of cultural awareness in survey construction. Chapter 9, “Experiments,” by Clopper, defends the reading, word list, and minimal pairs tasks that often conclude an interview or serve as stand-alone research projects.
Part 3, “Working With and Preserving Existing Data,” focuses primarily on collecting data from extant sources; one chapter also explores storage and access issues. Schneider’s chapter 11, “Written Data Sources,” describes the value of using written data to study variation against the traditional disciplinary preference for spoken language. Martineau’s vignette details types of speech features that might be observable in written texts, and Angermeyer describes legal documents as a source for sociolinguistic study and application. D’Arcy and Vigouroux offer guidance on transcription practices.
Kendall’s introduction to chapter 12, “Data Preservation and Access,” and Kretzschmar’s vignette both call for focused efforts by sociolinguists to prioritize making data permanently available to other researchers. Davies’ vignette suggests that researchers can follow his model of using available texts to create massive corpora, as does Beal and Corrigan’s story of creating a speech corpus from old recordings. With Queen’s introduction to chapter 13, “Working with Performed Language,” television, film, and music are added as potential collection sites. Weldon and Adams provide vignettes, respectively, on observing media depictions of African American English and on identifying changes that occur in different presentations of the same script. In chapter 14, “Online Data Collection,” Androutsopoulos outlines principles for studying computer mediated communication.
Part 4, “Sharing Data and Findings,” emphasizes ways that research might be shared with nonlinguists. Ngaha describes using her research with Māori speakers to achieve reforms in New Zealand’s official treatment of the language in chapter 16, “Community Activism,” and in chapter 17, Charity Hudley describes issues and practices for working with schools. Green, Serpel, and Starks offer vignettes from their experiences with school-based research, culminating in Starks’s sobering warning on unintended consequences: materials she created to celebrate the vernacular of her subjects were ultimately used by administrators “as one piece of evidence to justify ending a bilingual education program for its speakers” (292).
Sclafani introduces chapter 18, “Sociolinguistics In and For the Media,” by describing media as a place where language issues emerge (e.g., ideologies related to Ebonics) and might be shaped (e.g., Wolfram and colleagues’ North Carolina Life and Language Project). Kiesling’s vignette guides readers through media engagement, even providing talking points for pro-sociolinguistic media encounters. Upton’s vignette describes working with the British Broadcasting Corporation to conduct a massive lexical survey, and Wong’s vignette illustrates the analysis of variation in print media sources. Chapter 19 is a concise conclusion from the editors and includes a link to the collection’s website (http://sociolinguisticdatacollection.com), which offers supplementary teaching tools.
While the shotgun-style presentation of this summary fails to do justice to any of the pieces assembled in this work, it should be suggestive of the wide-reaching nature of materials presented in Data Collection in Sociolinguistics. The format is clearly the distinguishing feature of the book, and it is appealing on a number of levels. As a volume intended to help new sociolinguistics students and researchers enter the field’s praxis, it introduces readers not only to a wide array of potential methodologies but also to the voices and perspectives of many current practitioners.
At the same time, the format does not allow any one writer to say a great deal about any topic covered, and this bears consideration by instructors reviewing this collection as a potential course text. Generally, because Data Collection represents an assemblage of so many short writings from so many scholars, it lacks the unified presentation and development of content that might be expected of a more traditional introductory text. For instance, because all contributions are written independently, several core concepts (e.g., the Observer’s Paradox, research ethics) are introduced to readers as new information a number of times. Contributors certainly take varying positions on such concepts, but their different perspectives often appear independent rather than explicitly interrelated. The writings also vary widely in terms of intended audiences. D’Arcy’s practical primer on transcription, for instance, is addressed to a researcher who has never transcribed. By contrast, Charity Hudley’s guidelines for conducting research in schools seem most applicable to established researchers who might be in a position to satisfy her mandate that the “time that educators spend working with researchers should also be compensated at a rate commensurate to their salary” (273). The range of audiences addressed is not problematic per se, but introduces text-internal inconsistencies that might not be present in more traditional approaches.
The author-centric nature of chapter introductions and vignettes, while providing an admirably diverse set of perspectives, also leads to some noteworthy topical omissions. For instance, in the chapter that follows Becker’s interesting deconstruction of the Sociolinguistic Interview, there is no vignette that focuses on working within a traditional Labovian paradigm (i.e., studying variation in speech in an urban setting). The vignettes in the chapter are fascinating and, importantly, address topics outside the purview of many sociolinguists (see above), but, because many new researchers will find themselves using the Sociolinguistic Interview as a starting point, it would be worthwhile to offer lessons learned about its conduct from experienced researchers. Not unrelated, the organization of the book, in terms of which vignettes are placed in which chapter, is not always straightforward. Upton’s chapter on surveying lexis through the BBC, for example, seems much better suited to complement Boberg’s advocacy for survey collection than Sclafani’s discussion of sociolinguistics and media. Frankly, the vignettes of parts 3 and 4 at times seem to be cycling back toward topics covered earlier in the collection. An instructor using the book as a course text might find it useful to reorganize a good deal of the content.
Such critiques should not be understood as discouraging readers from this collection. Indeed, Data Collection in Sociolinguistics seems ideally suited as a text for new students of sociolinguistics, at the both undergraduate and graduate levels. It is hard to think of a single book that covers interviews, ethnography, surveys, corpora, and media studies—all with thoughtful consideration of underlying research ethics—in such a succinct space.
Readers will also benefit from the vignettes’ presentation not only of good research decisions but also of good decision-making processes. Many contributors are frank about challenges they faced, mistakes they made, and lessons they learned as beginning researchers. (See notes above on Mann’s and Starks’s vignettes for examples.) Such perspectives present the sometimes mundane, sometimes hard tasks and choices researchers face as fluid processes rather than fixed solutions and equip new researchers with evaluative criteria for future unforeseen issues.
At the same time, established scholars will enjoy and discover new interests in the wide range of accessibly presented topics. Of note, practical advice from Kendall on storage and from Kretzschmar on sharing will likely cause many researchers to reconsider how they handle on-hand data. Data Collection also echoes calls by many sociolinguists to use research to benefit the people we study and the programs we serve (cf. Wolfram 2012)—a point that may inspire scholars to find new uses for their work.
Overall, it is exciting to encounter so many ideas from so many researchers in such a concise collection. Data Collection in Sociolinguistics is a unique approach to the genre of the methods text and one that readers will find both thought-provoking and enjoyable.