Quantitative social psychological studies of 'language attitudes' (particularly speaker evaluation experiments using the 'matched-guise technique') are a popular area of research. But they have also been the subject of much criticism, especially from the perspective of social constructionism. This article focuses on two central points of debate: the issue of whether or not (language) attitudes should be regarded as stable mental entities, and the issue of the attitude-behavior link. Contrary to what has been suggested, adopting a constructionist perspective on these issues does not entail abandoning all quantitative methodology in favor of qualitative (discourse) analysis. Rather, it means conceptualizing speaker evaluation experiments as contextually situated 'communicative events'. Under such a recast, experiments can be usefully harnessed for the explication of sociolinguistic behavior such as strategic style-shifting. More generally, quantitative 'language attitude' research needs to take constructionist considerations into account in order to retain its scientific relevance today.

This article addresses the unresolved issue of systematic survey area selection for large-scale quantitative Linguistic Landscape (LL) studies. It presents a strategy of ‘hypothesis-driven stratified sampling’ whereby survey areas are picked out in a nested, multi-step process on the basis of the configuration of local LL audiences (regarding age, multilingualism, and tourism) and ambient activity types (commercial vs. residential). The rationale for this strategy is drawn from variationist sociolinguistics; and the undertaking is accordingly cast as ‘Variationist Linguistic Landscape Study (VaLLS)’. The details of the design are showcased and implications discussed in the context of the large-scale project ‘ELLViA – English in the Linguistic Landscape of Vienna, Austria’. More generally, it is shown how the application of state-of-the-art variationist principles and methodology to quantitative LL research significantly enhances the latter’s scientific rigor, which has been a major point of criticism.

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