observers paradox

This term, coined by William Labov (1973), refers to the difficulties experienced by
researchers when they try to obtain naturally occurring linguistic
data. This is because the researcher needs to systematically observe and record
language as it is used in a natural context. However, the presence of the
observer or recording equipment may cause those who are being observed to
alter their behaviour. The following is a (simplified) example of transcribed
spoken data, taken from the British National Corpus (file KP0).
Speaker A: Its fucking brilliant . . . Shit they didnt record that did they?
Speaker B: It doesnt matter.
Speaker A: Well I said a rude word . . .
Speaker B: Well no it doesnt matter. Anonymity guaranteed. . . . They wont use
the bit where we say fuck fuck fuck.
Speaker A: Fuck.
Researcher presence can thus result in language use that is not representative of
the everyday language of the researched community, and yet it is only through
such systematic observation that the researcher can obtain the required data,
hence the paradox.
A potential solution could be to secretly record the subjects, although this
would be viewed as a breach of researcher ETHICS and not recommended. A
more ethically sensitive solution to overcome the observers paradox would be
to use family members and friends to record speech (in the absence of the
researcher) in the hope that those being researched will feel more at ease and
therefore produce natural speech. The researcher could also try to carry out
analysis on a group that he/she already belongs to, as there would already
be pre-established ways of interacting. Another solution could be to ask
informants to recount tales of personal experience, which would be likely to
produce an emotional response, resulting in more naturalistic speech. The
researcher may also decide to disregard the first ten minutes or so of the
recording, in order to allow the subjects to acclimatize to being recorded.
Finally, the researcher could acknowledge the paradox when carrying out the
analysis. Depending on our research focus, the above example does not give
completely useless data it could still be of interest to see how the participants
oriented to being recorded, how they conduct TURN-TAKING and which
words they used under these circumstances (why did they say fuck and not
some other word?).