Methodologies for data collection are central to the study of social variation in language. With a focus on real language, a primary aim of sociolinguistics is to create and refine methods for the collection of data that reflects spoken and written language in use.
Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications provides up-to-date, succinct, relevant, and informative discussion about methods of data collection in sociolinguistic research. Our volume will contain longer chapters as well as shorter vignettes written by top sociolinguists, both veteran and emerging scholars.
Our volume includes four parts:  “Research Design,” “Generating New Data,” “Working With Existing Data,” and an innovative final section, “Sharing Data and Findings,” which treats issues of data preservation and access as well as linguistic gratuity, or the growing concern among sociolinguists that scholars “give back” to the communities they study.  Our text therefore not only details methods of data gathering but also of data sharing, exploring how researchers communicate with a wide variety of public groups and research participants while still maximizing the use of the data to address research questions of both academic and lay interest.