ABSTRACT
The major goal of sociolinguistic panel studies is to determine whether time is a significant predictor of changes to individuals' language as they age. This chapter describes two longitudinal panel studies of young North American women. It discusses the ways in which the interviewer/researcher-participant relationship did or did not undergo transformation over time in each study. The chapter also discusses some tactics that are used to control for that transformation in the fieldwork or the data analysis. It explores the future directions and best practices for interview-based sociolinguistic panel studies, particularly with regard to balancing complementary sources of error across studies. The chapter provides how longitudinal interviewers can manage the inevitable waxing and waning of social distance between themselves and their participants as a study proceeds. It also provides a comment made by a Language Change and Stabilization (LCS) informant whom Suzanne re-interviewed upon returning to Philadelphia in 2012, after a gap of six years.
