Methods of data collection in English empirical linguistics research: Results of a recent survey

Publication date: March 2020Source: Language Sciences, Volume 78Author(s): Ignacio M. Palacios MartínezAbstractMost handbooks on research in English Linguistics state that in conducting any kind of research-based study, the method of data collection should be in agreement with the purpose of the research itself. However, the reality is that many studies into language pay very little attention to this central element of research. In this paper, which can be regarded as a partial replication of Krug and Schlüter (2013) study, I will reflect on this issue, basing my observations primarily on a survey carried out to identify the most common methods of data collection currently used in English empirical linguistics. For this purpose, the abstracts of 1,143 papers published in 2017 from 32 international and high impact journals were consulted, together with a sample of over 200 papers which were examined in their entirety. The journals were grouped according to seven subdisciplines, to see the extent to which there was a correlation between the method of data collection used and the nature of the subdiscipline in question. General findings were broadly as expected. Experimental studies were the most prevalent, followed by corpora, interviews, questionnaires, case studies, ethnographic projects, computer-mediated communication, observation and grammaticality judgement tests. However, in a fifth of all the studies considered it was not in fact clear what method of data collection h...
Source: Language Sciences - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research