The "Bulletin Board" Survey

Questionnaires have long been used as a research tool in studies of Canadian English (e.g. Chambers 1994, Dollinger 2015), whether in person, in written form or more recently, digitally. In this talk, I introduce a unique type of questionnaire, the "bulletin board poster" survey. In this talk I will describe an ongoing project that I have been undertaking as a research assistant at the Strathy Language Unit at Queen's University since September 2017. During this time, I have been creating biweekly questionnaire posters on a range of topics in Canadian English – lexical, phonological and syntactic, which I display in public areas on campus. I then tabulate the data and create posters summarizing the results, which I also display on campus. The "bulletin board poster" method of data collection clearly has its limitations, such as the lack of control over who participates and how accurately they do so, but it has benefits as well, such as engaging the participants on the topic and encouraging participation in more rigorously controlled studies. In my presentation, I will discuss the stages of this project, the pros and cons of the "bulletin board poster" method and other survey methods and share some of our results. I hope to encourage discussion on this type of data collection and share my tips on how I manage to make this a successful way of collecting data.