ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the quantitative approaches for exploring and analysing people's data. This partly reflects one's own research expertise and it's partly because their experience tells them that quantitative methods are what cause students the most headaches when they start studying sociolinguistics. But real language data is not only suited to number crunching. In fact, some approaches, like ethnography, reject quantification and instead place value on exploring the quality of the data, delving into the specifics of how speakers use language and analysing forms in light of the larger social and conversational context that they occur in. The chapter discusses the way in which the two modes of analysis, the quantitative and the qualitative can be usefully combined. The phrase mixed methods research is increasingly common in the social sciences. For some researchers, the difference between qualitative and quantitative analysis is simply one of scale, quantitative analysis is what they can do when they have enough qualitative observations.
