ABSTRACT
The sociolinguistic interview has been critiqued for a number of years as being overly narrow or restrictive. This reaction may have contributed to the recent development of what Mary Bucholtz and Hall call “new coalitions,” the deliberate involvement of interactional and ethnographic approaches from conversation analysis and linguistic anthropology. Valuable and capable of adaptation as it is, the sociolinguistic interview is not, of course, the only way to elicit data that will support the study of such topics as identity, stylization, historical change, variation, dialect, and the vernacular, all of which are crucial components in sociolinguistics. For example, Feagin reminds us that postal, phone, and in-person rapid surveys can be highly useful. The expanded use of the internet for research and teaching not only supports data collection but also offers a way to involve students in relatively transparent analysis that can incorporate interviews.
