Sociolinguists are also generally interested in research around language choice and language change. Generally speaking, Sociolinguists often ask research participants a uniform set questions in order to attain consistent data. Interviews conducted by Linguistic Anthropologists tend to be very loosely structured in order to solicit, to the best degree possible, naturally spoken language. Linguists go to the field to be around language varieties, but are not really among the folks. Linguistic anthropologists spend considerable interacting with people while in the field in order to study how language is used by people in everyday situations.
Linguistic Anthropologists tend to focus on linguistic performance and situated discourse.