ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the author's decision to use survey methods raised crucial questions about the appropriate research strategy for working in urban multilingual situations. It discusses in more detail how the survey instrument was designed, how the bilingual and collaborative strategies were implemented in the field, and how the samples were selected. The chapter emphasizes the history of language acquisition and learning, and on self-assessment of the skills of individual respondents in the minority language. It explains the households which included children or young people under the age of twenty-one, and for all other respondents interviewers were instructed to bypass it. The chapter intends to gather relevant personal information which had not been elicited earlier. The Adult Language Use Survey provides a far larger body of data than any of the other surveys carried out by Linguistic Minorities Project. The task of data-processing was of necessity lengthy and complex.
