The most fundamental challenge for sociolinguistic research is how to obtain appropriate linguistic data to analyse. But how do you actually do it? The best exemplars that exist – Labov (1972a), Milroy (1987) and Sankoff (1973, 1974) – were written in the 1960s and 1970s. Detailed individual accounts are rarely published, except in dissertation methodology chapters. Some of most memorable fieldwork tips I ever received were from chatting to sociolinguists at conferences (see also Feagin 2002: 37). In fact, fieldwork methods may be the best-kept secret of sociolinguistics. In this chapter, you will learn everything I know about how to collect data.

THE BASICS

The very first task is to design a sample that addresses ‘the relationship between research design and research objectives’ (Milroy 1987: 18, Milroy and Gordon 2003: 24). At the outset, a sociolinguistic project must have (at least) two parts: 1) a (socio)linguistic problem and 2) appropriate data to address it.

Perhaps the consensus on good practice in this regard is to base one's sampling procedure on ‘specifiable and defensible principles’ (Chambers 2003: 46). The question is: What are these, and how to apply them?

DATA COLLECTION

According to Sankoff, the need for good data imposes three different kinds of decisions about data collection on the researcher: a) choosing what data to collect; b) stratifying the sample; and c) deciding on how much data to collect from how many speakers.