The BSI interview involved several types of tasks ranging from oral sentence completion to guided conversation. The wide variety of tasks yielded two kinds of data. One involving a set of predefined sociolinguistic variables was administered with the help of index cards. Such data were itemized and numerically coded. The other type of data came from guided conversations. The present work breaks down into two chapters following the structure of the BSI interview data.
Chapter One lists the itemized data in the order that they were elicited. Each task is printed in separate sections with introductory comments containing the instructions to the informants and field workers. The reading passages are also displayed in the form that they were administered to the informants.
Chapter Two contains a full repertoire of conversation modules that field workers could choose to introduce. As explained in section 2.1, the actual choice and sequencing of these modules were left to the discretion of the field workers with the following important restrictions. (1) There was a set of obligatory modules that they had to introduce with every informant (some modules even had to be introduced with the introductory wording repeated verbatim). (2) The field workers could use the modules in any sequence but they were strictly instructed to avoid abrupt shifts of topic.
It is hoped that this detailed publication of the full BSI data both
on paper and in electronic form![[*]](foot_motif.gif){kind=small}
will prove a useful compendium to reseach utilizing this unique resource
of Hungarian sociolinguistics.
February 1998 Tamás Váradi
Váradi, Tamás. 1998. From cards to computer files: Processing the data of The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview. Working Papers in Hungarian Sociolinguistics No. 3, January 1998. Linguistics Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest.