ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the steps needed to prepare data for quantitative analysis, but some of the general steps apply to qualitative studies as well. People had already noticed that existentials in Bequia English alternate between the there is/are-type forms used in standard English and it have/get-type forms used in the Caribbean, so people created two columns for the variable: first one allows people to annotate token for the form of the subject and second one focuses on the form of the verb. For a lot of people, detailed coding of the dependent and independent variables can be a huge chore. Some researchers report their coding in more of a narrative and interweave the coding system with aspects of their literature review. Cheshire takes this approach for the linguistic variables; the social variables are introduced with the analysis. Some social factors are coded etically and some linguistic features are coded emically.
