Hudson criticizes what he calls 'the Labovian method of identifying variants and calculating scores' as follows.
Information about the use of individual variants is lost when these are merged into variable scores, and information about the speech of individuals is also lost if these are included in group averages. at each stage the method imposes a structure on the data which may be more rigid than was inherent in the data, and to that extent distorts the results -- discrete boundaries are imposed on non-discrete phonetic parameters, artificial orderings are used for variants which are related in more than one way, and speakers are assigned to discrete groups when they relate to each other in terms of networks rather than groups.
In an essay of at least 250 words, argue for or against 'the Labovian method of identifying variants and calculating scores.