ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the consequences of paying so much attention to the pursuit of interactional “naturalness” that the usability of the audio data suffers as a result. If there were a Murphy’s Law of sociolinguistic interviews, it would be that researcher’s most interesting interviews always seem to have the worst-quality recordings. Whether they take place in a particularly noisy room, or researchers forget to switch on a piece of researcher’s equipment, or a battery runs out midway through the interview, any number of technological challenges can come between researcher and researcher’s ability to collect and analyze researcher’s data. Yet despite the sense of awkwardness, it is imperative for the success of researcher’s data collection that researcher’s be able to request a move to another location. Many of the issues that Hall-Lew Lauren confronted during her interviews were related to ambient noise. This type of noise can, potentially, be detected and evaluated by an experienced interviewer.
