Research Design

Part I of this volume, “Research Design,” addresses two central concerns in relation to sociolinguistic data collection: research design and ethics. First, the chapters and vignettes in this section provide guidelines, offer suggestions, and troubleshoot challenges that can arise when asking research questions, choosing frameworks and paradigms, and designing a study, all of which directly affect what data are to be collected and how. Second, while many authors throughout the volume discuss ethics, the authors of the chapters and vignettes in this section grapple with specific challenging ethics-related questions that are particularly, though not exclusively, relevant to sociolinguists conducting research with human subjects. How should we represent research participants? What issues should we consider when working with vulnerable populations, who may need more protection than ethics boards would normally require? What sort of ethical dilemmas face scholars who work with written documents? How should our ethical decision-making protocols be adapted when conducting research online? As the authors in this section assert, these questions should be considered not only at the beginning but throughout the research process. In Chapter 2, Barbara M. Horvath emphasizes the diverse frameworks, topics, and methods that are included under the umbrella of sociolinguistic research. Sociology, anthropology, geography, psychology, and other disciplines have influenced sociolinguistics, leading to diversity in research design, methods, and the linguistic and social phenomena to be investigated. As Horvath says, the connection between the linguistic and the social is inseparable and requires the studying of both. As a result, sociolinguists often employ qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodological approaches, as questions about language change in progress (generally quantitative) are frequently tied to questions about what variability means to speakers (generally qualitative). At the same time, while an array of research frameworks, paradigms, designs, and methods is available to sociolinguists, the central concern of sociolinguistics as a field is the nature of language variation and how it relates to social contexts, factors, and outcomes. Within that scope, researchers must decide which aspects of language variation, change, and social meaning to foreground, which to background, and how to do so as they plan and conduct their research. In Vignette 2a, Marcia Farr extends the conversation about research paradigms and design to multidisciplinary sociolinguistic studies, in which a

researcher draws from multiple disciplines to inform the research at hand. Farr illustrates the benefits and challenges of this approach with her own study of transnational Mexican families, which drew from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, history, sociology, and cultural studies. Multidisciplinary research requires a deep understanding of the concepts being borrowed from other fields. It also requires researchers to be flexible, patient, and open to the evolution that research drawing from multiple theoretical and empirical traditions often necessitates – a process that, Farr says, is demanding but ultimately rewarding. Three subsequent vignettes address the topic of variables in sociolinguistic data collection. In Vignette 2b, “How to Uncover Linguistic Variables,” Walt Wolfram notes the importance of examining linguistic variables that may be outside of the “canonical set” but that may nevertheless provide important insight into sociolinguistic variation. Two such variables – a-prefixing in Appalachian English and the “call oneself ” construction in African American English – are useful case studies in the methodological and analytic challenges that can arise when uncovering, describing, and analyzing linguistic variables. In Vignettes 2c and 2d, James N. Stanford and Rania Habib respectively discuss complex social variables, which are often imbued with local and contextualized meanings of which researchers may initially be unaware. In his work in southwest China, clan emerged as a meaningful social variable only after Stanford became engaged in the community, interacted with a range of residents, and learned the cultural knowledge required to interpret its relevant social structures. In her research in one rural and one urban speech community in Syria, Habib intended to investigate the role of social class on language variation. Unlike in Western contexts, however, where education, occupation, and income are often good proxies for social class, in these communities income and residential area proved to be the relevant class indicators. Both Stanford and Habib note the limitations of assuming that social variables operate in the same way across different contexts. Rather, researchers must acquire in-depth knowledge of the community to determine which social variables are relevant and how they relate to sociolinguistic variation. Conducting ethical research with those from whom we collect our data has long been recognized as a critical goal for sociolinguists, especially for those who conduct field-and community-based research. In Chapter 3, “Social Ethics for Sociolinguistics,” Sara Trechter provides readers with grounding in both normative ethics, which focuses on establishing criteria for right and wrong actions, and applied ethics, which considers how to act in specific situations. She notes that while sociolinguists have traditionally done well in considering applied ethics, we have paid correspondingly less attention to normative ethics, such that the broad concepts of ethics and ethical engagement remain undertheorized in sociolinguistics. As such, Trechter challenges sociolinguists not only to think about the real-life decisions that must be made while conducting research, but also to articulate and debate our philosophical standards and models for ethical reasoning that guide our judgment. Doing so will allow socio linguists to establish effective, consistent recommendations for how to conduct ethical research.