Designing Questionnaires for Language Studies

Designing Questionnaires for Language Studies is a guide to the design and use of questionnaires for empirical linguistic research, particularly in the areas of dialectology, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Whether completed via written correspondence or through interviewing, questionnaires play an essential role in linguistic research. Yet, the design of questionnaires is rarely taught formally, leaving researchers to learn effective design in practice. This practical and accessible text offers structured, step-by-step guidance to provide researchers with the skills they need to make the most of questionnaire-based research. It also provides a history of the use of questionnaires in linguistic research and critically examines the assumptions and motivations inherent in their creation and administration, as well as that of the questions that populate them, and discusses how biases can negatively affect the outcome of the research itself. Experience using these tools in the field has led to their refinement over time. Armed with this knowledge, readers can make informed decisions about how to structure their own questionnaires as they embark on linguistic investigations or use it to better understand the results of previous research that has relied on questionnaires for data collection.