Practice Methodology - Language Change

I was looking at Language Change in the lesson and my practice methodology is based on the hypothesis that the Language used in children’s books has changed over time. My chosen corpus of data would be the works of Hans Christian Andersen and particularly the works that are aimed at children. I would do a Longitudinal study. In the data I would be looking for changes in the use of phonology, lexis and grammar. I would also look at the frequency of particular words in relation to social context. I would also look at the use or absence of stereotypes in his work because many of his pieces are fairy tales so they may or may not be evident in his writing. To sample the data I would systematically choose every 3rd text when all of the texts are ordered chronologically. All the texts in my pool of data would be texts with a primary audience of children. If any significant pieces in my final sample that may affect my results then I will study them but I may exclude them from my final results and explain the reasons why in my evaluation and analysis. The comparability factors are that all the data in my pool are written by the same author and for the same audience. It might be hard to operationalise what texts are considered to be written for a primary audience of children so I might hand out a list of my sample data and ask the general public in a questionnaire which pieces are more suitable for children in order to help overcome this issue however more issues could arise e.g. some people may not have come across certain texts in my corpus of data. My data pool is large because Andersen has plenty of texts suitable for my investigation so even if there are anomalies it should not affect the rest of the data. There are no ethical issues with this investigation since Andersen's work is open to the public and informed consent is not necessary.