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Media type:
E-Article
Title:
The Written Questionnaire as a Sociolinguistic Data Gathering Tool : Testing Its Validity
:
Testing Its Validity
Contributor:
Dollinger, Stefan
Published:
SAGE Publications, 2012
Published in:
Journal of English Linguistics, 40 (2012) 1, Seite 74-110
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1177/0075424211414808
ISSN:
0075-4242;
1552-5457
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
Self-reports in linguistic study, which were central to the dialect surveys of the twentieth century, have, by and large, been relegated to the sidelines by more advanced sociolinguistic techniques in recent years. This article probes into the validity of written self-report surveys in relation to the fieldwork method for Vancouver, British Columbia. Confirming Chambers’s general findings of equivalence, it produces insights into the preferred length of written questionnaires and offers recommendations as to question type. The present article also compares the written questionnaire results to acoustically analyzed recorded data for yod-dropping and the low-back vowels before /r/, identifying linguistic items that correlate well with results from self-reports and those that fail to produce reliable results because of ongoing linguistic change or reindexicalization in the case of yod-dropping. Overall, written self-report surveys are found to be highly reliable data gathering tools if certain factors are kept in mind.