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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

African Americans--Languages--Case studies; African Americans--Languages; Linguistics--Research; Case studies;

Abstract

The scope of this paper is methodological. It is concerned with the procedures involved in collecting data within the guidelines of a sociolinguistic framework. The data have been collected and are contained in tapes which are on file in the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at the University of Northern Iowa. The study was designed to be generational in the sense that parent and child form a generation. Black children and their parents were contacted for their willingness to cooperate in the study. The purposes and procedures to be used were explained to them and they then indicated whether they were interested in participating in the project. This was the population used in the research. The population was divided into two groups by place of formal education of the parents, either North or South. These subpopulations were then subjected to random sampling techniques to draw fifteen children and their parents for each group. Another random sampling was done to select one parent to participate with the child in the study. The completed project contained fifty-two subjects instead of sixty because four families were not able to participate and were dropped from the study, The investigator also traveled to Holmes County, Mississippi, to obtain language samples. A close relationship between Holmes County and Waterloo exists. Eleven adult subjects were used in the Mississippi sample. Following the completion of the fieldwork the sociological data were analyzed. The groups were compared using a t-test technique. The A-1 A-2 only significant difference in the groups was the length of residence of the adult subjects in Waterloo. The conclusions section of the paper contains the investigator's impressions, problems, and suggestions regarding the linguistic fieldwork process. It also contains suggestions for subsequent research using the data gathered during the fieldwork.

Year of Submission

1972

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Speech

First Advisor

Roy Eblen

Second Advisor

Ralph Schwartz

Third Advisor

Don L. Nilsen

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

1972

Object Description

1 PDF file (108 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Included in

Communication Commons

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