 The preferred method of Essentialists today is informal elicitation, including elicitation from oneself. Although the techniques for gathering data about speakers and their language use have changed dramatically over the past 60 or more years, the general strategies have not: data is still gathered by elicitation of metalinguistic judgments, collection of corpus material, or direct psychological testing of speakers’ reactions and behaviors. Different linguists will have different preferences among these techniques, but it is important to understand that data could be gathered in any of the three ways by advocates of any tendency. Essentialists, Emergentists, and Externalists differ as much on how data is interpreted and used as on their views of how it should be gathered.