Telephone interviews

Telephone interviews were conducted mostly according to the

methodology of the Telsur project as described in ANAE. Once a community was selected, I consulted the data from the 2000 United States Census7 _{to determine}

the most-represented ancestry groups in the community. For instance, in

Watertown, the most frequently reported ancestry in the 2000 Census was Irish (18% of Census respondents), followed by German (13%) and Italian (12%). I then selected two letters randomly, and used WhitePages.com to generate a telephone directory of households in the chosen community whose names began with the selected letters. Starting from the beginning of that directory, I would then call the first telephone number on the list that was associated with a name that appeared characteristic of one of the top few ancestry groups in that community. If I failed to record an interview with a subject at that number, I would move on to the next name fitting the same ancestry qualification. If in this way I exhausted the directory generated by my randomly-chosen pair of letters without recording an interview, I selected a new pair of letters and began again.

After conducting an interview, I selected a new pair of letters immediately to begin a new directory to recruit my next interview subject, rather than

completing the directory in which the previous subject was found.8 _{My target}

was to complete two usable telephone interviews in each community.

When a person answered the phone at any of these numbers, I introduced myself by reading the following script, based on the script used for the

interviews reported in ANAE:

Hi there; my name is Aaron Dinkin and I’m a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. We’re doing some research here on communication between different parts of New York, and so we’re looking for people who grew up in certain places to help us out by telling us a little bit about how people say things in each area. Did you grow up in _________? If yes: Do you think you could you take a few minutes now to answer some questions about it?

If a speaker answered affirmatively that they had grown up in the community of interest, and was willing to participate in the research, then after getting

permission to make a recording of the conversation I began the interview. The subjects of the last two telephone interviews in Cooperstown (Nellie M. and Sally B.), conducted in the late summer of 2008, were recruited not by cold-calling numbers listed with randomly-chosen initial letters, as above, but through referrals by a previous interview subject acquainted with them. These interviews were conducted at appointed times planned several days in advance. The same interview methodology was employed in the interviews with these subjects as with the cold-called speakers.

8 _{According to this methodology, people for whom the third letters of their surnames are near the}

Telephone interviews began, following the Telsur model, with general questions about the subject’s travel experience and familiarity with regional dialect diversity, and moved on to free spontaneous conversation about the same topics addressed in the in-person interviews: everyday life in the community, the local economy, and so on. After five to ten minutes of free spontaneous speech, I moved on to formal elicitation methods. These formal methods, like those used in the in-person interviews, included a set of semantic-differential questions. Since written word lists and minimal-pair lists are impossible over the

telephone9

, they were replaced with requests for general classes of words (such as “Name all the articles of clothing you can think of”) and elicitations of specific words and pairs of words through targeted questions. A typical minimal-pair elicitation would proceed as follows:

What kind of animal runs in the Kentucky Derby? (horse)

What do you call it when your throat feels scratchy and sore and you can’t speak very well? (hoarse)

Do you think those two words sound the same or different? Would you say them both again, and tell me which is which?

At the end of the telephone interviews, subjects were asked for the same demographic information requested in the Telsur project—age, occupation, parents’ occupations, education, and ethnicity. Subjects were also asked whether they would be willing to be contacted again in case I needed more information about their community. Almost all subjects were willing to be contacted again; it was through my telephone interview subjects in Sidney and in Cooperstown that I arranged my pre-appointed interviews with speakers in those villages.

9 _{In some of the telephone interviews conducted in 2006, I followed the ANAE methodology of}

mailing (or e-mailing) subjects a word list to read and then calling them back at a later date to record them reading it. This method was abandoned in later interviews in the interest of saving time.

Telephone interviews typically lasted between 20 and 35 minutes. The laboriousness of the word-elicitation questions contributed heavily to their length, typically about ten minutes longer than an in-person interview.