ABSTRACT
For the past several years, the author has been conducting research in communities that are often defined as “vulnerable populations” by ethics boards, including Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the United States. During the focus group sessions, participants listened to each speech sample and discussed their attitudes toward each clip. Participants were brutally honest in their discussions. One participant, for example, described a speaker as “an overly confident dumb ass who really shouldn’t be confident”. As a researcher, the author appreciated the extent to which the focus group participants presented their attitudes openly and honestly. Up until now, he author has been talking about whether or not to use pseudonyms to protect field sites and fieldwork participants. The information that participants provided was very personal and had the potential for worsening what, for many of the participants, were already strained family relationships. Working with “vulnerable populations” specifically and human subjects more generally poses many challenges for sociolinguists.
