- Series Information
- About the Editors
- List of Tables
- List of Figures
- The Study of Language and Society
- Variationist Sociolinguistics
- Linguistic Anthropology
- Doers and Makers: The Interwoven Stories of Sociology and the Study of Language
- Critical Discourse Analysis
- Conversation Analysis
- The Intersections of Language Socialization and Sociolinguistics
- Psycholinguistic Approaches
- Interdisciplinary Approaches
- Studies of the Community and the Individual
- Experimental Methods for Measuring Intelligibility of Closely Related Language Varieties
- Quantitative Analysis
- Analyzing Qualitative Data: Mapping the Research Trajectory in Multilingual Contexts
- Longitudinal Studies
- Methods for Studying Sign Languages
- Pidgins and Creoles
- Language Maintenance and Shift
- Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition
- Sign Language Contact
- Phonology and Sociolinguistics
- Morphosyntactic Variation
- Pragmatics and Variationist Sociolinguistics
- Variation and Change
- Sociolinguistic Variation and Change in Sign Languages
- Language Policy, Ideology, and Attitudes in English-Dominant Countries
- English in Language Policies and Ideologies in Africa: Challenges and Prospects for Vernacularization
- Language Policy and Ideology: Greater China
- Language Policies and Politics in South Asia
- Language Policy and Ideology in Latin America
- Language Policy, Ideology, and Attitudes Key Issues in Western Europe
- Language Management in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Post-Soviet Countries
- Language Ideologies, Policies, and Attitudes toward Signed Languages
- Language and Law
- Our Stories, Ourselves: Can the Culture of a Large Medical School Be Changed without Open Heart Surgery?
- Sociolinguistic Studies of Signed Language Interpreting
- Language Awareness in Community Perspective: Obligation and Opportunity
- Linguistic and Ecological Diversity
- Language Revitalization
- Sociolinguistics and Social Activism
Abstract and Keywords
A sociolinguist who has gathered so much data that it has become difficult to make sense of the raw observations can turn to graphical presentation, and to descriptive statistics, techniques for distilling a collection of data into a few key numerical values, allowing the researcher to focus on specific, meaningful properties of the data set. A sociolinguist evaluates hypotheses about the connections between linguistic behavior, speakers, and society. The researcher begins this process by gathering data with the potential to falsify the hypotheses under consideration. Inferential statistics allow the researcher to compute the probability that a hypothesized property of the data is due to chance, and to estimate the magnitude of the hypothesized effect. This chapter compares inferential methods appropriate for sociolinguistic data in terms of these assumptions. It examines elements of qualitative analysis and methods for binary analysis, multinomial variables, and continuous variables.
Kyle Gorman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. His research deploys quantitative techniques for the study of phonology, morphology, and language acquisition and variation.
Daniel Ezra Johnson is Lecturer in Sociophonetics at Lancaster University (UK). He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Stability and Change along a Dialect Boundary: The Low Vowels of Southeastern New England (Publication of the American Dialect Society 95). His research interests include quantitative methods and dialectology.
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