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  • Qualitative methods in sociolinguistics by Barbara Johnstone
  • Timothy C. Frazer
Qualitative methods in sociolinguistics. By Barbara Johnstone. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 164.

This textbook introduces students to the ‘qualitative’ side of methodology in sociolinguistics. While quantitative methods involve counting and, often, fairly sophisticated statistical tests to determine the significance of data, qualitative methods involve close observation of a linguistic community. A quantitative study of any given language community might involve a count of how many individuals use variety X or Y, with the numbers broken down according to such variables as sex, age, socioeconomic status, or ethnicity. A qualitative study of the same community might closely examine the behavior of a few individuals to determine the uses they might make of one variety or another. Qualitative sociolinguistics also involves both the researcher’s personal familiarity with the community and her use of introspection and intuition. While these resources must obviously not be the sole source of data, they can and often have greatly enriched our understanding of the use of language.

An introductory chapter explains that the book will discuss ‘four phases of research methodology’ (4): developing research questions, field methods, analytical methods, and writing. Ch. 2, ‘Methodology in historical context’, reviews the methods of the linguistic atlas projects in North America and Europe and the ‘discovery procedures’ of descriptive linguists. This chapter emphasizes the role of interpretation, as shown by the various treatments of linguistic atlas data. Ch. 3, ‘Thinking about methodology’, walks the student through the process of getting from selecting the community that interests her to forming the questions that will direct the study, especially in narrowing the focus of the topic. A case in point is a study of a Bengali-Malaysian community. A first draft of a dissertation proposal offered to ‘collect data and analyze language use in a multicultural polyglot community and to test whether notions about language and society . . . remain valid here’ (26). This original proposal, rejected as too broad, was later narrowed with a series of questions: ‘Is language used as a device for negotiating identity in this community?’ ‘Does peer pressure affect language choice?’ ‘Is codeswitching valued in this community?’ (26–27). Eventually a single question emerged which structured both the collection and analysis of data: ‘How do different women in this multilingual Malaysian-Bengali immigrant community use the Bengali language to negotiate identity?’ (27).

This same chapter also discusses the case of a student who worked as a volunteer with Alzheimer’s patients in a nursing home. Only through beginning actual interaction with a single Alzheimer’s patient did the student begin to focus her study to the point that she knew how to formulate questions. Both of these cases point up the value Johnstone places on the researcher’s familiarity with and good instincts about the communities to be studied.

Ch. 4, ‘Some legal and ethical issues’, focuses on the problems of surreptitious recording and of interview subjects’ right to some benefit from the study. Ch. 5, ‘Standards of evidence’, examines the terms reliability, validity, random, and significant. An important section for students is a list of characteristics of inadequate evidence.

Ch. 6, ‘Thinking’, is an excellent examination of the role played by intuition and introspection, using Lakoff’s 1974 Language and woman’s place as a case study. While not all of Lakoff’s assertions may be valid, her work nevertheless became the focal point of ensuing discussions of language and gender, shaping the direction of research.

Ch. 7, ‘Looking’, examines the role of ethnography in sociolinguistics. Here again, close involvement in and familiarity with the community studied becomes as important a part of drawing conclusions as does the collection of data. Actually, both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ researchers can make a contribution. J notes that in a study of Texas speech she conducted with Judith Bean, ‘as a Texan with an obviously Texan way of talking and interacting, Bean made the Texas women we interviewed feel as if they would be understood and sympathized with; as a non-Texan [End Page 567] with amore reserved style, I . . . could ask dumb-sounding questions whose answers Texans might assume to be obvious to...

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