ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces three examples of research projects that count things: a sociolinguistic survey, an attitudinal survey and a corpus linguistics project. Most universities will require students who collect data from specific individuals to get their informed consent, and most universities will require students to undergo a process of approval for projects that collect such data. Traditional ethical debates for linguistics researchers would focus on data collection by covert tape recording and whether, for example, this should be permitted if consent to use the recording in the research was obtained from the participants after the recording was made. One key distinction in understanding what type of study you are doing is between experimental and non-experimental studies. There is sometimes a sense that a study is more 'scientific' if it is based on experimental data or if it can be 'proved' or replicated in experimental conditions.
