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Eureka! or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2020

Celeste Kinginger
Celeste Kinginger*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
*
Email: cxk37@psu.edu
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Extract

Two decades ago, a personally-addressed ten-page survey printed on salmon-colored stock appeared in my campus mailbox. An accompanying letter explained that the sender was a student collecting data for a graduate-level thesis and included contact information for the thesis advisor … in marketing. It was the one and only ‘Consumer Durable Goods Study’ I would ever receive as an applied linguist.

Type
First Person Singular
Information
Language Teaching , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 38 - 46
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

1

(a) In the popular imagination, the exclamation ‘Eureka!’ is attributed to the Greek mathematician Archimedes. According to legend, he first realized that the buoyancy of an object placed in water is equal in magnitude to the weight of the water the object displaces at a bathhouse, leapt out of his bath shouting ‘Heureka’ (‘I have found it’), and raced home through the streets naked. (b) For a century, ‘Eureka’ brand vacuum cleaners have remained a familiar fixture of budget-conscious U.S. households.

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