ABSTRACT
Most of the chapters in this book have focused on quantitative approaches for exploring and analysing your data. This partly reflects our own research expertise and it's partly because our experience tells us that quantitative methods are what cause students the most headaches when they start studying sociolinguistics. But real language data is not only suited to number crunching. In fact, some approaches – like ethnography – reject quantification entirely and instead place value on exploring the quality of the data, delving into the specifics of how speakers use language and analysing forms in light of the larger social and conversational context that they occur in. We have touched on some of these more discourse-based approaches in some of the earlier chapters and the purpose of this chapter is to discuss ways in which the two modes of analysis – the quantitative and the qualitative – can be usefully combined. The reason some researchers like to combine quantitative and qualitative is that it enables them to understand better the full range of social and linguistic functions that language variation serves.
