This edited volume brings together the major researchers in the field of panel research, highlighting connections and convergences across and between chapters, methods and findings with the aim of initiating a dialogue about best practices and ways forward in sociolinguistic panel studies.

Introduction Isabelle Buchstaller and Suzanne Evans Wagner I. Methodological conundrums in building, sharing and analyzing panel corpora Before there were corpora: The evolution of the Montreal French project as a longitudinal study Gillian Sankoff Alternative sources of panel study data: Opportunities, caveats and suggestions Christopher Cieri and Malcah Yaeger-Dror On the utility of composite indices in longitudinal language study: The case of African American Language Janneke Van Hofwegen and Walt Wolfram II. Key life-stage events across the life-span Longitudinal sociophonetic analysis: What to expect when working with child and adolescent data Mary Kohn and Charlie Farrington The influence of age on estimating sound change acoustically from longitudinal data Ulrich Reubold and Jonathan Harrington III. Stylistic determinants of linguistic malleability Comparing speech samples: On the challenge of comparability in panel studies of language change in real time Frans Gregersen, Torben Juel Jensen and Nicolai Pharao The effect of small Ns and gaps in contact on panel survey data Patricia Cukor-Avila and Guy Bailey What makes a panel study work? Researcher and participant in real time Suzanne Evans Wagner and Sali A. Tagliamonte IV. Interdisciplinary approaches Ethnographic perspectives on panel studies and longitudinal research Chantal Tetreault Longitudinal studies in sociolinguistics and SLA: Bridging two parallel routesHélène Blondeau