Social psychologists require access to naturalistic data which cannot be reproduced in laboratory conditions (unlike many other psychology-related fields), while at the same time they are under pressure to quantify and test their theories rather than rely on qualitative data. This places them in a curious position.
One area of research in social psychology is that of how and why people attempt to explain things. Explanations (or attributions) are important to the psychologist because they reveal the ways in which people regard their environment. To obtain data for studying explanations researchers have relied on naturally occuring texts such as newspapers, diaries, company reports etc. However, these are written texts, and most everyday human interaction takes place through the medium of speech. To solve this problem Antaki and Naji (1987) used the London-Lund corpus (of spoken language) as a source of data for explanations in everyday conversation. They took 200,000 words of conversation and retrieved all instances of the commonest causal conjunction because (and its variant cos). An analysis of a pilot sample derived a classification scheme for the data, which was then used to classify all the explanations according to what was being explained. For example "actions of speaker or speaker's group", "general states of affairs" and so on. A frequency analysis of the explanation types in the corpus showed that explanations of general states of affairs were the most common type of explanation (33.8%) followed by actions of speaker and speaker's group (28.8%) and actions of others (17.7%). This refuted previous theories that the prototypical type of explanation is the explanation of a person's single action. Work such as Antaki and Naji shows clearly the potential of corpora to test and modify theory in subjects which require naturalistic quantifiable language data, and one may expect other social psychologists to make use of corpora in the future.