A Quantitative Approach to Speech Communities: Fieldwork Strategies

There are various quantitative approaches that a sociolinguist may use while undertaking a research study. This paper aims at enabling researchers to identify and understand these quantitative approaches for effective data collection. These approaches which are simply referred to as fieldwork strategies are meant to give headway into the research. Fieldwork strategies help a researcher in data collection and eliciting of the right information from the sample population. Action research, surveys, case studies and experiments are used by sociolinguist researchers in research studies. The importance of these approaches in fieldwork studies differs from one another hence a researcher must choose the most appropriate approach, one which will result in the best results possible. It is undeniable that while undertaking a research work, a researcher will face several problems which may affect the valid and reliability of the research results. Some of these problems are inaccessible information resources, cost constraints, ethical, and theoretical challenges. Therefore a researcher needs to find ways of mitigating these problems, for instance properly constructed budgetary planning, or looking for funding of research work is one way of dealing with cost constraints. The quantitative approaches are however deemed central in the successful completion of research study, and hence the fieldwork strategy chosen by the researcher will be helpful in mitigating these problems.