Quantifying Language: A Researcher's and Teacher's Guide to Gathering Language Data and Reducing It to Figures

Part 1 Setting the scene - what is quantified and why?: basic terms - what do people quantify? why do people quantify language? - the teaching/therapy reason why do people quantify language? - the research reason. Part 2 Data gathering for quantification - kinds of instrument and technique: overview of four general kinds of approach to data gathering for quantification data for quantification - fully naturalistic data for quantification - quasi-naturalistic interaction data for quantification - opinion data for quantification manipulation maximizing naturalness in the data-gathering phase of language quantification the "referencing" dimension of quantification. Part 3 Data analysis in quantification - scoring, counting and scale types: overview of scale types - simple sources of interval scales scoring on interval scales - counts of various sorts scoring on interval scales - totals from uniform sets of dichotomous items scoring on interval scales - scores involving rating and weighting scoring on interval scales - combined scores of various sorts individual rank ordering ranking in ordered categories nominal categorization. Part 4 Good and bad quantification: overview of quality issues and reliability - measurer as source of unreliability cases, circumstances and the measuring instrument itself as sources of unreliability overview of validity - measurer, cases etc, as sources of invalidity specification of the nature of a variable and its operationalization as a source of invalidity indicators as a source of invalidity.